Prior to his centennial confession to James Estrin of the New York Times that our conclusions in this investigation have proved correct in almost every particular, John Morris worked feverishly to cover his tracks. This ill-conceived effort took the form of a series of madcap variations on his original fable of the famous emulsion melt that purportedly ruined Capa’s D-Day negatives. […]
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Clearly, we still have much work to do if we hope to dislodge this fable from the mythology of photojournalism and photo history — not to mention the larger D-Day into which it has become so thoroughly woven. Yet there’s grounds for hope, that “thing with feathers.” […] Two noteworthy facts about this blog’s readership: It’s roughly evenly divided by gender (46 percent female, 54 percent male), slightly over half of whom fall between the ages of 18 and 34. The latter demographic surprises and gratifies me, indicating as it does that the issues I address here, and my approaches to them, prove of interest to many people not of the geezer persuasion. […] Robert Capa’s habit of self-invention proved contagious for John Morris, his self-styled “adopted brother,” both of them prone to the condition Steven Colbert named “truthiness,” which he formally defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” […] Clearly, Capa fudged the truth and even lied outright whenever it served his purposes, telling multiple versions of his anecdotes and choosing his sometimes extreme variations according to how he gauged his listeners and the professional consequences of his disclosures. For reasons of his own, John Morris still chooses — at least publicly — not to see it that way. […] |
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