Robert Capa D-day “ruined” film article

thanks for the new article. i read a.d. coleman's articles when they were first published on his site. people were quite upset about the iconoclasm, but aren't we all the better for intellectual freedom and getting the truth out there via real scholarship?

Produced in most other cases under Cornell’s watchful eye or the supervision of one or another participant in the Capa Consortium, the remainder of the serious, scholarly literature on Robert Capa has almost all been subject to Cornell’s approval and reliant on either the problematic principal reference works or on Robert Capa materials stored in Cornell’s private home in Manhattan, with access dependent on his consent. Consequently, it constitutes an inherently limited corpus of contaminated research, fatally corrupted by its unswerving allegiance to both its patron and its patron saint. Such bespoke scholarship becomes automatically suspect.
Click to expand...
 
Read all stuff back in 2014. Coleman's attempt at finding a conspiracy where there's no need for any doesn't sit well with me.

To quote from the RFF thread back in the day:
I cannot understand why anyone would care what happened to the other photos he did, or didn't, take. If he only got 11 shots on the whole trip, does the lack of more diminish those 11 shots?
Click to expand...
 
you should read the introduction of this new article. it lays out the stakes more succinctly than the previous series of blog posts.
 
Thanks for the share... really interesting article. It goes to show you can’t always accept things at face value. Sometimes our heroes are not quite what we think. The Steve McCurry photoshopping scandal made me feel the same way.
 
Seems to me that Capa was a serial liar. Even made up his name. Faked shots. Stole credit from Taro. He got the glory but when it really counted he was a chicken s***. So much for "if your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."

If you want to study a true war photographer who didn't do it for personal glory, take a look at James Nachtwey.
 
https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/conflict/robert-capa-d-day-omaha-beach/


"But the excited darkroom assistant, while drying the negatives, had turned on too much heat and the emulsions had melted and run down before the eyes of the London office. Out of one hundred and six pictures in all, only eight, were salvaged. The captions under the heat-blurred pictures read that Capa’s hands were badly shaking”.

It is 2019, I'm glad some of you are still able to get it!
Atta boys! Reading is good for you, keep on, learn how to google it. :)
 
PRJ said:
Seems to me that Capa was a serial liar. Even made up his name. Faked shots. Stole credit from Taro. He got the glory but when it really counted he was a chicken s***. So much for "if your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."

.
Click to expand...
COnsidering the guy died doing his job, I'd say the chicken sh*ts are the folks who make these kind of comments behind the safety of a keyboard.

As for the main article, it contains so many straw-man arguments it simply sabotages itself. Like, duh, Slightly out of Focus was claimed to be all true? Laughable.

Capa frequently said he was terrified on the beach and only stayed a short while. So?
 
PRJ said:
Seems to me that Capa was a serial liar. Even made up his name. Faked shots. Stole credit from Taro. He got the glory but when it really counted he was a chicken s***. So much for "if your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."

If you want to study a true war photographer who didn't do it for personal glory, take a look at James Nachtwey.
Click to expand...
First off, if you were a Hungarian Jew in Europe during the 1930s, would you change your name if it might save your life? Hitler's regime didn't work out too well for that population, just as a hint.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Capa was chicken s***. I've been in combat. With a rifle and a camera and I won't claim that I wasn't frightened constipated. I had the ability to defend myself and my fellow squad members. I had protection from a mounted .50 cal as well as a 240G. I was flanked on both sides by a squad of Marines and a squad of Seabees, both a block away. And I was scared through it all.
So I posit this to you: if you can't produce your own shots you took from Normandy on June 6, 1944, you have no right as an armchair combat photographer to call him chicken s***. None whatsoever. If you do have these photos or something analogous, you wouldn't have made the claim in the first place.
Capa's motives aside, he was on the beach on that day, while the sun was still up and he got a few shots. That's a hell of a lot more stones than most of us can lay claim to.
Phil Forrest
 
Phil_F_NM said:
First off, if you were a Hungarian Jew in Europe during the 1930s, would you change your name if it might save your life? Hitler's regime didn't work out too well for that population, just as a hint.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Capa was chicken s***. I've been in combat. With a rifle and a camera and I won't claim that I wasn't frightened constipated. I had the ability to defend myself and my fellow squad members. I had protection from a mounted .50 cal as well as a 240G. I was flanked on both sides by a squad of Marines and a squad of Seabees, both a block away. And I was scared through it all.
So I posit this to you: if you can't produce your own shots you took from Normandy on June 6, 1944, you have no right as an armchair combat photographer to call him chicken s***. None whatsoever. If you do have these photos or something analogous, you wouldn't have made the claim in the first place.
Capa's motives aside, he was on the beach on that day, while the sun was still up and he got a few shots. That's a hell of a lot more stones than most of us can lay claim to.
Phil Forrest
Click to expand...

Posts like this make me regret there is no "like" button here. Well said!
 
I don't see what the fuss is all about.

Many things we consider as historical facts could be bogus, no big deal.

Robert Capa as professional as he was with a camera could have had many things effecting him that day.

From close shave whizzing bullets and exploding shells to dysentery, fear and panic, being tired, being seasick, being hung over to just simple mistakes that we all make when we are not ourselves, like forgetting to change to a higher shutter speed, on a Contax II camera those shutter speed numbers are hard to see, to forgetting to take the lens cap off our camera while taking a photo with an RF camera.

Sh!t happens.
 
This "study" is seriously flawed: the authors went out to prove that Capa didn't take more shots because he was scared to death. Any investigation that is set up to prove a preconceived notion is by definition useless.

If Capa stayed for 1.5 hours as claimed, wouldn't you assume that such a veteran war photographer had taken more than 11 shots? Eyewitnesses said that this part of the beach was not under heavy fire; there are no bodies floating in the water, you don't see bullets or grenades hitting the water, and the soldiers that were supposed to be "hiding" behind the barriers were actually army engineers in the process of removing the barriers.

But maybe it is true that Capa only stayed for a rather short period of time and tried to rush the few pictures that he took back to Life magazine to meet the deadline.
 
Anyone who willingly went into battle armed only with a camera - including jumping from a plane with combat troops as Capa did later in Europe has my respect as a brave man. Truth is, I get heartily sick of revisionist "historians" with an agenda setting out to pull down people who unlike them were living their life under the gun, not sitting behind a desk, desperate to make a name for themselves by trying to poke holes in others' reputation. (No reflection at all on CCoppola for posting the link he was right to do so but those who wrote it - not so sure).

Before being critical of Capa we should remember how Capa died - he died in the field having stepped on a land mine, in Indo China with French front line troops. That is not the death of a wanna-be or a coward or an unprofessional. Big deal if Capa was scared on Omaha beach. He would be an idiot not to be. And anyone who has read the books, seen the movies or learned the history of that event knows that. In fact if memory serves me correct Capa made no secret of being terrified and wanting to get off the beach and this was reported in his biography Blood and Champagne.

Capa was not a perfect man by some standards- he was a womaniser, he was a renegade, he was happy to spend the money earned by other photographers at Magnum on champagne and good living (according to HCB) and he was sometimes a little liberal with the strict truth. But he was a real mench. He was a man who did stuff. He reported war and revolution in Spain, in Europe, in China, in Israel and in Indo China. He was in short, like many of the men who volunteered to go to war and who lived life in the moment because that is all the time they could be certain of.
 
Capa probably did what any other rational human being would do and got the hell off the beach as fast as he could - I certainly can't criticize him. Rather it just points out the incredible bravery of the guys who knew they had a job to do and couldn't turn around to go back to England - they stayed on the beach (and of course many of them died there) and did what they were trained to do. They were the true heroes whose intestinal fortitude allow us to did back in our cozy homes and read all this s**t on the internet.
 
ptpdprinter said:
Was there another photographer that landed on D-Day and published images?
Click to expand...

If I remember correctly there were a number of other photographers, especially armed forces photographers covering the landings. But Capa was a star and everyone else was a part of the supporting cast...at least as far as the Time-Life group was concerned. You can do a net search and find lots of photos from the D-Day invasions. Most of them were better than Capa's.

I don't doubt Capa's bravery and talent. And I don't question his decision to return after only spending a short time with the invasion. But it does kinda feel wrong for so many excuses to have been made for his work in the years since D-Day when other photographers were making better photos and not getting the credit given to Capa.
 
I really don’t discredit Capa for only snapping a few photos and getting the hell out of there. I respect ANY person willing to enter a combat zone for the sole purpose of recording the history of something remarkably terrifying. It serves a purpose as both a reminder of our history as well as to reflect on how fortunate most viewers are that they will never experience the horror of war. In the end, to me it doesn’t really matter whether he took 100+ or only 8 photos. Still had more guts than I do, that’s for sure. I just simply found the article an interesting read and felt that people here might like to have a look.
 
Dogman said:
If I remember correctly there were a number of other photographers, especially armed forces photographers covering the landings. But Capa was a star and everyone else was a part of the supporting cast...at least as far as the Time-Life group was concerned. You can do a net search and find lots of photos from the D-Day invasions. Most of them were better than Capa's.

I don't doubt Capa's bravery and talent. And I don't question his decision to return after only spending a short time with the invasion. But it does kinda feel wrong for so many excuses to have been made for his work in the years since D-Day when other photographers were making better photos and not getting the credit given to Capa.
Click to expand...

Yes there were other photographers - including the unheralded ones who deserve better - enlisted photographers tasked with recording events. And I really do agree they deserve better recognition. But of the photos I have seen the Normandy battle there are few that were made when the bullets were actually flying. Unlike Capa's iconic images.

Many other images were made in the Higgins Boats, going in, or in the aftermath as aid was rendered to the injured, prisoners were taken or bodies were being tagged. All important to record But it's not quite so hard to make sharp photos when not threatened by imminent death. But all of this kind of misses the point. Capa's images are famous because they were made in the duress of battle and somehow their blurriness added to the immediacy. However that happened.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom