The myth of Robert Capa’s D-Day, as publicly initiated by Capa himself, constitutes a classic example of the form of fraud referred to disdainfully by those in the military as “stolen valor.” […]
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So TIME/LIFE has made a slow-motion but dramatic about-face, going from studiously ignoring the myth of the London darkroom disaster at its public birthing in Charles Wertenbaker’s 1944 book and Capa’s certifying it in his 1947 memoir to enthusiastically promulgating it seven decades later. […] Capa resigned his lucrative staff position at LIFE in January 1947 to go freelance once more. He may have made that choice in part so as not to bite the hand that fed him when his fictionalized memoir, “Slightly Out of Focus,” came out that fall, with its first formal, on-the-record claim directly from him that the magazine’s London staff had ruined his D-Day films. […] Robert Capa unquestionably had the skills required to make astonishing images at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He presented himself with his camera and lens at the historic setting from which he could have derived such images. But he pressed the shutter release a mere 11 times; that’s all he registered on his one roll of D-Day film. On this crucial occasion, the opportunity of a lifetime, he failed himself, his picture editor, his publisher, his public, and history itself. […] |
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Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (7)
All the evidence necessary to impeach the story that Morris and Capa and these others have told all these years, is presented as visual imagery in the brief TIME video from May 29, 2014. But it goes by too fast to analyze. You simply have to stop the flow of the video, freezing time by turning it into a set of still photographs, in order to read the images and words carefully. Then it becomes a confession. […]