Capa

This subject has got me a bit engaged as you can tell by my several posts.

Though I believe from recorded interviews that Capa had stated he elected to go in with Easy Company, the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, US Army 1st Division which he believed would be in the first wave, it also would not surprise me to find that there may have been some delays or changes to the order of battle that mean that this unit did not hit the beach till later - the photos do show for plenty of action ahead of him when he landed. It is of course also possible that Capa was not being strictly accurate in saying he elected to go with the first wave (he was known for exaggeration) and perhaps this was compounded by his loose interpretation of English something he was also known for - "one of the first waves" sounds awfully like "the first wave" if you are of that mindset.

Never the less I felt that one way of checking further on his time of landing was from tide times. Planners had elected for the landings to start shortly after low tide - one reason the 5th, 6th or 7th of June were selected as possibles was that low tide occurred at around dawn. The reason for selecting low tide (not high tide which army planners wanted in order to get the men off the sand as quickly as possible) was that Rommel had planted thousands of underwater staked obstacles. Landing at low tide meant they could be avoided by incoming landing craft and blown up by engineers. A further downside to going at low tide incidentally was that many landing craft grounded off shore in sand bars forcing the men to struggle ashore through the deeper water between the sand bars and get shot down (or drowned) in the process. If anyone has had this kind of experience (and I have though decidedly not under fire attacking defended beaches) they will understand its quite scary enough when the bullets are not flying.

But Capa's images show those obstacles clearly well out of the water. If they are not under water it was because the time was not too far off absolute low tide - perhaps an hour or a bit more, just as the planners planned. Whatever the exact time he made his photos it could not have been very late in the piece as the obstacles were designed to be "underwater" obstacles. You can see some of the them here:

time-100-influential-photos-robert-capa-d-day-34.jpg


Here is a report on the tidal conditions which when read in conjunction with Capa's photos suggest to me that he went onto the beaches, if not in the first wave, then reasonably soon thereafter.

"The tidal range from one low water to the next high water along the entire French coast of the English Channel was never less than six metres. At low tide, those large tidal ranges exposed long stretches of beach that Allied soldiers would have to cross under heavy German fire......

.....From low water, the water would rise at a rate of at least a metre per hour, sometimes even faster due to shallow-water effects. Five landing beaches had been identified (code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword) and the timing of the tidal conditions varied between them. Between the farthest of them, separated by only about 100km, the difference was more than an hour – so the landing time on each beach, had to be staggered according to the tidal predictions.

Initial landings needed to be soon after low tide so that demolition teams could blow up enough obstacles to open corridors through which the following landing craft could navigate to the beach. To allow enough time for the demolition teams to blow up a sufficient number of beach obstacles, the times of low water and the speed of the tidal rise had to be known precisely. The tide had to be rising, because the landing craft had to unload troops and then depart without danger of being stranded by a receding tide."

So: First wave? One of the first waves? Does it really matter when what is clear he was there, there was an awful many men dying that day and he got the pictures and got them back for publication. He did his job.
 
Phil_F_NM said:
Here's a hypothetical:
Capa took many more photographs and the public affairs bureau of the allied forces only liked 10 of them. At the time, the allies were in their fourth full year of all out war, on a global scale. People were rationing and many were going hungry, especially after the previous decade of the depression. So perhaps what Capa could have photographed were hundreds of soldiers dead in the surf and sand but between the supreme allied commander, the public affairs division and the actual publishers, it was judged that seeing a flotilla of corpses would have been horrible for already low morale. I'm just talking from having been the public affairs guy in my unit. I had to think about those things and then had to get my images cleared through my CO then 1MARDIV PAO in order to get my photos out on the wire.
Capa could have even been given the directive to stay away from shooting images of too many casualties because the mothers at home don't want to see their sons in the current issue of Life before the chaplain has knocked on the door.
Phil Forrest
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First italics: Assuming that the hypothetical missing photos were censored, would they go to the trouble of removing the emulsion? I would have thought they'd just shred them and be done.

Second italics: Possibly more likely but we'll never know. However, as Peter says they took the photos, they were just either held back, or in the case of the Leipzig photos they were published with the faces covered.

I still believe he shot what he needed and got out of there to save himself and meet deadlines. The story about the melting emulsion was just the darkroom staffs best guess at why the rolls were mostly blank, after all, why would the great Robert Capa not have taken more photos?
 
michaelwj said:
First italics: Assuming that the hypothetical missing photos were censored, would they go to the trouble of removing the emulsion? I would have thought they'd just shred them and be done.

Second italics: Possibly more likely but we'll never know. However, as Peter says they took the photos, they were just either held back, or in the case of the Leipzig photos they were published with the faces covered.

I still believe he shot what he needed and got out of there to save himself and meet deadlines. The story about the melting emulsion was just the darkroom staffs best guess at why the rolls were mostly blank, after all, why would the great Robert Capa not have taken more photos?
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I pretty much agree with what you say but as regards your last sentence I do not believe the rolls of film were mostly blank at least not originally. On reading the chapter about this in "Blood and Champagne" it seems clear that when the rolls came out of the development and washing baths the initial report phoned through to his boss John Morris from the laboratory dark room was that Capa had performed brilliantly and got some excellent shots. There was no suggestion at this stage that he only got 11 exposures. But following developing and washing comes drying..............

It was shortly after this - after the film had been put into the drying cabinet to dry that one of the staff came running into Morris's office to say the films had been ruined due to the cabinet over heating. When they checked only 11 negatives were still printable, the rest were blurred beyond use or even recognition in some cases. This is one reason I am confident that the author of the article in question is wrong at least on this point- the accounts given not just by Capa but also by at least 3 Life staff members back Capa up. Capa must have stayed long enough on the beaches to load and expose 4 rolls of film. He was using two Contax bodies so each had to be reloaded at each once. And if anyone has used Contax they will understand they were just as fiddly to load as other cameras of that era - including if memory serves me correctly, removing the back and baseplate. Not a trivial matter with shaking hands and when wet cold, frightened as well as ducking for cover.

So it seems clear to me that at least according to accounts given by Life staff who were directly involved, Capa partly or wholly exposed 4 rolls as claimed, only to lose most of them as described in the lab. Capa may have a motive to lie if he had done a funk and run away from Omaha beach with no more than a handful of blurry shots. But why would those who were involved at Life magazine wish to make themselves look foolish if they were not telling the truth. They had no stake in upholding Capa's reputation - their loyalty was to Life magazine.
 
willie_901 said:
I find it risible to judge the artistic aesthetics of Cappa's D-Day photographs. Comparing them to photographs made under pleasant and relaxed circumstances is naive and superficial. ...
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Completely agree, wonder how did we went this direction...

Although its funny exercise to think a HCB's version of soldier hopping over the puddle in Normandy, in a hail of bullets :rolleyes:
 
jarski said:
Although its funny exercise to think a HCB's version of soldier hopping over the puddle in Normandy, in a hail of bullets :rolleyes:
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Funny, yes, but he would have been wise enough not to do it. Why would he?

Anyone who was stupid enough to go there could hold a camera to take this kind of pictures.

I hate this kind of bravery for money and fame.

Erik.
 
Erik van Straten said:
Funny, yes, but he would have been wise enough not to do it. Why would he?

Anyone who was stupid enough to go there could hold a camera to take this kind of pictures.

I hate this kind of bravery for money and fame.

Erik.
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Well HCB was part of the Résistance so he did have at least as much Balls as Capa if not more so. He just wasn't a war photographer-

But I believe the whole comparison with HCB ist not really conductive to the discussion.
 
peterm1 said:
(...) But following developing and washing comes drying..............

(...) And if anyone has used Contax they will understand they were just as fiddly to load as other cameras of that era - including if memory serves me correctly, removing the back and baseplate. Not a trivial matter with shaking hands and when wet cold, frightened as well as ducking for cover.

So it seems clear to me that at least according to accounts given by Life staff who were directly involved, Capa partly or wholly exposed 4 rolls as claimed, only to lose most of them as described in the lab. Capa may have a motive to lie if he had done a funk and run away from Omaha beach with no more than a handful of blurry shots. But why would those who were involved at Life magazine wish to make themselves look foolish if they were not telling the truth. They had no stake in upholding Capa's reputation - their loyalty was to Life magazine.
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The drying accident cannot be hold different than a total mystification. Come on ! You have - like many of us - developed enough B&W rolls to know that too hot a drying will just not make the negatives totally blank. Too hot a drying would make the negative curl and get distorted with random stains on the photos at the very worst but it would not make the image disappear. No way !

I have a Contax II and can very well confirm that the use of modern film cartridges the same size of the Kodak cassettes of Capa's era, without the trick of small rubber washers glued on the film cartridge and take-up spool seats at the camera back, will make the film sprockets be in the exposed frame at the top of the shutter gate (and visible, on the horizontally framed photos, at the bottom of them).

So, no melting emulsion having slided down the film base here, neither.

To reload a Contax II you remove the camera back like on a Nikon F. The use of reloadable cassettes made it way easier but doing this in the cold tide under the enemy's fire wasn't a garden-party for sure.

About the truth and telling the truth : thas was a darn bloody war and that was the third one for Capa (he had photographed horrors in Spain and China before 1941 and had also been on bloody battlefields in North Africa and Italy in 1943 and the only woman he had really loved ever had been killed while photographing a war in 1937).

On June 6th 1944, where was the "truth" located in Capa's mind ? Who can tell this ?
 
Who hangs their film horizontally to dry? Surely if the emulsion has slid off it would slide down the length of the film not off the side.

Apologies for the HCB interlude, I tend to go off on tangents.
 
Highway 61 said:
The drying accident cannot be hold different than a total mystification. Come on ! You have - like many of us - developed enough B&W rolls to know that too hot a drying will just not make the negatives totally blank. Too hot a drying would make the negative curl and get distorted with random stains on the photos at the very worst but it would not make the image disappear. No way !

I have a Contax II and can very well confirm that the use of modern film cartridges the same size of the Kodak cassettes of Capa's era, without the trick of small rubber washers glued on the film cartridge and take-up spool seats at the camera back, will make the film sprockets be in the exposed frame at the top of the shutter gate (and visible, on the horizontally framed photos, at the bottom of them).

So, no melting emulsion having slided down the film base here, neither.

To reload a Contax II you remove the camera back like on a Nikon F. The use of reloadable cassettes made it way easier but doing this in the cold tide under the enemy's fire wasn't a garden-party for sure.

About the truth and telling the truth : thas was a darn bloody war and that was the third one for Capa (he had photographed horrors in Spain and China before 1941 and had also been on bloody battlefields in North Africa and Italy in 1943 and the only woman he had really loved ever had been killed while photographing a war in 1937).

On June 6th 1944, where was the "truth" located in Capa's mind ? Who can tell this ?
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Perhaps read what I said in an earlier post about the properties of thermoplastics of which the old celluloid film bases in use during WW2 were characteristic. I may be right or I may be wrong in that post but my point is who has tried it? Almost certainly people here on this site who have experience in processing only have ever experienced modern film bases introduced long after WW2. The relevant bit of my earlier post:

"PS On the subject of whether film emulsion will "melt" in extreme heat conditions there have been some here say that they have never known it to happen and I respect that.

But I wonder if they have considered that this might not have been caused by the emulsion melting, but rather the film base melting. Back in the day, film stock would have certainly been celluloid (cellulose) based, not a more modern stable and safe film stock which came in after 1951. The film used by Capa might have been either highly dangerous and flammable cellulose nitrate or the more safe substitute introduced in the 1930s made from cellulose triacetate - probably the latter I would suggest given its date of introduction to the market. In either event celluloid based film is inherently unstable and are what are known as thermoplastic - "A thermoplastic, or thermosoftening plastic, is a plastic polymer material that becomes pliable or moldable at a certain elevated temperature and solidifies upon cooling" (Wikipedia - Thermoplastic) In short it behaves exactly as described by Banks and Morris."
 
peterm1 said:
Perhaps read what I said in an earlier post about the properties of thermoplastics of which the old celluloid film bases in use during WW2 were characteristic. I may be right or I may be wrong in that post but my point is who has tried it? Almost certainly people here on this site who have experience in processing only have ever experienced modern film bases introduced long after WW2. The relevant bit of my earlier post:
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That it is told to have happened only once in the whole rather busy career of Capa (and subsequentcally in all other war photographers') and with a terrible bad luck just for those D-Day photos doesn't really play in favor of this theory. Serious historians don't despise statistics to help making their mind up.

I have closely seen the "Mexican suitcase" negatives with my own eyes. How clean such late 1930s negatives still hold today is unbelievable (but all true). Although their processing then storage condition were probably the worst ever...
 
Erik van Straten said:
Can I help?


Erik.
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I’d say no problems, next time you’re in Brisbane. But I don’t know your travel plans so I might just say thanks but no thanks to the keel hauling (I don’t have a tall ship anyway), and if we catch up I’ll buy you a beer instead.
:D

I am now aware that we are (well I am) taking up more space talking about why HCB was brought up (or that I did) than we did talking about him in the first place.
 
Highway 61 said:
That it is told to have happened only once in the whole rather busy career of Capa (and subsequentcally in all other war photographers') and with a terrible bad luck just for those D-Day photos doesn't really play in favor of this theory. Serious historians don't despise statistics to help making their mind up.

I have closely seen the "Mexican suitcase" negatives with my own eyes. How clean such late 1930s negatives still hold today is unbelievable (but all true). Although their processing then storage condition were probably the worst ever...
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"Serious historians don't despise statistics to help making their mind up."

Yep, and serious historians don't despise evidence either......... And all the evidence states that all the people present at the time said it happened exactly the way history records it to have happened. Not the way some writer who is writing almost 80 years later says it might have happened based largely (it seems to me) on little more than speculation that since it was a rare event it could not have happened.

"I have closely seen the "Mexican suitcase" negatives with my own eyes. How clean such late 1930s negatives still hold today is unbelievable"

Yep, I suppose we should presume the negatives were never placed in an overly hot drying cabinet.
 
peterm1 said:
"I have closely seen the "Mexican suitcase" negatives with my own eyes. How clean such late 1930s negatives still hold today is unbelievable"

Yep, I suppose we should presume the negatives were never placed in an overly hot drying cabinet.
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I suppose we should presume the "Mexican suitcase" negatives were placed in an overly hot and humid suitcase for decades. Yet the images didn't wiped off themselves on those prewar cellulose triacetate negatives (mainly made by Agfa) nor got eaten by fungus and the like.

Although I can understand very well why it was invented and although, like I wrote before, it doesn't deprive Capa from all the consideration and respect he deserves for his unique courage and photographic skills, I don't and won't buy the overly hot drying cabinet story.

But, you can.
 
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