Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Safeguarding Truth

An excellent article published yesterday in Ochre, Safeguarding Truth in Photojournalism: Ami Vitale’s Survival Guide which looks at how the way in which some of Vitale’s images were appropriated and misused on the web, and how this hit the photographer:

“It literally stopped me in my tracks,” she said in an interview with Ochre. “There was a week I thought this was enough: I’m quitting. And then I realized that this was actually just a call to action to try to educate people, protect yourself and the people you photograph as best you can.”

The article goes on to explain the steps that she took, along with others who helped her to do this, and has a great deal of good advice and links to resources. (Ami Vitale is one of the photographers mentioned in the previous post, Inge Morath & Danube Revisited.)

I posted about the misuse of her images and her response here in May, in Image Abuse, and much of the advice in her survival guide has also been covered here in previous posts, though it is good to have it all put together in the Ochre article.

She says “I hated watermarks before. I thought they were so tacky.” I thought the same, and came very reluctantly to my decision to use a relatively discreet visible copyright message in 2010 after some very much more minor problems with the unauthorised usage of my own work, though I’d advocated their use in a post here a year earlier. Virtually every image I’ve posted on the web since then has carried this visible watermark, though sometimes its been midway through the year when I’ve got around to changing the date.

Much earlier I made sure that every image carried my contact details in the metadata, though that too often gets stripped out. With my watermark along the bottom of the image that too is easily removed, but for anyone to do so would be clear evidence of guilt, and my experience is that most people who use images without consent don’t remove it. Most unauthorised use of images on the internet is by people who just aren’t aware of copyright or think it doesn’t apply to their use.

There are a few aspects of the Ochre article that relate to the USA and its peculiar copyright system, which makes the enforcing of copyright financially non-viable in the US unless photographers register their images with the US Copyright office, while permitting punitive damages for registered images. Its a system that non-US photographers can use as well, but the surprising fact quoted in the article is that “less than 3% of professional photographers surveyed by the American Society of Media Photographers in 2010 registered their work.”

There is also some information about the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) Registry which I mentioned back in 2008, and again three years ago in PLUS Makes Progress , and it is apparently still making progress – if it does seem rather slow. You can register for free – as I did in 2011 – and this enables you to be found in the registry from your name or some other information. But to get real benefit from it you will need to become a supporting member – and for individual photographers -“small businesses with one employee, the contribution of $125 per year (reduced to $75 per year for members of participating trade associations)” may not seem worthwhile.

I was also very pleased to hear of yesterday’s US court judgement which affirmed the damages of $1.2m awarded to photographer Daniel Morel after AFP and Getty stole his images of the Haiti earthquake. The court did make one minor adjustment, ruling that there was insufficient evidence that Getty was guilty of half of the DCMA violations, which will same them just a few pennies. I can’t pretend to understand all of the court ruling, but – as in the earlier trial – it is certainly damning. I’ve never understood why AFP and Getty felt the case was worth fighting and didn’t come to a settlement with the photographer as soon as they discovered what had happened. Presumably they just thought they were big enough to bully their way through, though perhaps the award and presumably the costs they will have to pay might make them think differently.

I have posted before about the Morel case, but there is more information on Jeremy Nicholl’s The Russian Photos blog, and though as I write he has yet to respond to the latest news, doubtless he soon will. His last post in January about the AFP/Getty appeal estimated that the case will cost AFP and Getty to well over $10m, most of which will go to the lawyers – including those who presumably told them the case was worth pursuing. For the lawyers it certainly was!

Inge Morath & Danube Revisited

I have to admit to something of a blind spot so far as Inge Morath is concerned. I knew the name of course, and that she was one of the first women to join Magnum, a little after Eve Arnold, in 1953 (becoming a full member in 1955.) She had earlier met Capa when she went to Paris as a writer working with Ernst Haas in 1949 and had then worked for Magnum as an editor and researcher before coming to London.

She started taking her own pictures in 1951 and she worked for Simon Guttman at Report, first as a secretary and then as a photographer before returning to Paris and Magnum. Russell Miller in Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History says she did the little jobs that the men didn’t want and that her first, of judges in rose contests, paid only $100. That would be worth over $900 allowing for inflation, not a bad little job – how times have changed for photographers.

Looking at her work on Magnum, there are certainly pictures that I remember having seen and admire, but none that I would have looked at and recognised as her work; I might well have thought they were probably by a Magnum photographer but I don’t see any particular strong personal style. Perhaps it might be more apparent if I’d ever owned one of the various books she produced.

After her death in 2002, Magnum established the Inge Morath Award, made annually to one or more exceptional young women photographers, and her family set up the Inge Morath Foundation the following year to preserve and share her legacy.

I’ve for some time been following the progress of Danube Revisited, the Inge Morath Truck Project, a photographic road trip taking a travelling exhibition of Morath’s work from the Danube area along by the river in a converted 7.5T truck, together with nine of the winners of the Inge Morath Award who have worked as a collective taking pictures and promoting “the power and potential of photography through night projections, artist talks, photo forums and engaging in cultural exchange with institutions and organizations along the route.”

The nine are Olivia Arthur, Emily Schiffer, Lurdes R Basolí, Claire Martin, Claudia Guadarrama, Ami Vitale, Jessica Dimmock, Mimi Chakarova and Kathryn Cook, and they hope ” to discover for themselves the region that meant so much to Inge Morath throughout her life” and see “the River itself becoming a metaphor for the kind of long-term, sustained international projects to which they have devoted their careers. ” Kickstarter was used to fund the project, with an appeal for $50,000 raising $59, 563 from 323 backers.

On the Danube Revisited site you can see a great portfolio of pictures by Morath, from the region where she began work in 1958, visiting again over the years but only finally being able to complete her project after the fall of the Soviet Union gave freer access in the 1990s – and her book ‘Danube’ was published in 1995.

The links at the left of the Danube Revisited pages currently show portfolios of earlier work by the participating photographers, but you can see 60 pictures from Danube Revisited in a New Yorker portfolio, and you can also see pictures and many links on Tumblr.

Vanessa -no longer invisible

New York Times Lens blog has a nice piece by Rena Silverman, No Longer an Invisible Photographer about Vanessa Winship and her current show at Madrid’s Fundación Mapfre; even if you can’t get to Madrid you can take a ‘virtual tour‘ on their web site from outside the gallery and go in and see the work on the walls. The audio is in Spanish, but the rest of the site is available in English, and there are excellent images of around 25 of her pictures on-line.

I’ve mentioned her work on this blog several times in the past, most recently in Singing about Vanessa and it really deserves the attention it is now eventually beginning to get even in the UK. She was the first woman to receive the Henri Cartier-Bresson award in 2011, and quite possibly the only photographer ever to make a project about Barton-on-Humber, the place she grew up in.

Of course you can also see her work on her own web site, and in the book she dances on Jackson, made with the funding from the Cartier-Bresson award. This was a book I recommended when it came out (actually I think before it came out in the UK) at the time I ordered my copy. I note on Amazon it now says:

Hardcover

2 Used from £670.03 8 New from £130.00

although you can get it for less on Abebooks. Her ‘Sweet Nothings’ is still available at reasonable prices but the exhibition catalogue, as well as looking like a fine book may also be a good investment. You may need to order it from Spain.

About Minor and Ray

I’m not sure when I first got to know the work of Minor White. Like many my first introduction to the wide spectrum of photographic history and contemporary practice came through Helmut & Alison Gernsheim‘s ‘A Concise History of Photography‘ from which he is remarkably entirely absent, not fitting the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ vision that both focused and constricted their view of the medium.

Probably I had already seen some of White’s work when I got to know Raymond Moore (who got two pictures and an appreciative mention in the Gernsheim’s opus) through a series of workshops with him and Paul Hill at Paul’s Photographers Place in Derbyshire in the late 70s, but it was Ray’s appreciation and understanding of his work that really got me interested. Ten years ago I wrote:

In 1970, Ray read a feature in an American magazine about Minor White. He was already aware of White’s photographs, but the description there of White’s ideas, especially his interest in Zen, excited him as they seemed so similar to his own views. On a sabbatical from Watford, he decided to go to America to visit White, and photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, whose work he knew from in books. Ray stayed with White in America and they got on well; Ray saying “It came as something of a relief to find that people felt the same way as I did. I had been interested in Zen for a long time, even while I was a painter, and it was very exciting to see how this had been developed in photography.”

Ray’s work went down very well in America, and he was given solo shows at both the Art Institute of Chicago and George Eastman House in 1970, with a further show at a in Boston gallery in 1971. (Carl Siembab Gallery)

(You can read more of my thoughts and some comments on Ray and the workshops at Remember Ray Moore, posted here in 2010.)

It was perhaps an indication of how little White’s work was known in the UK at the time that I found it very difficult to get hold of a copy of his then out of print major work, Mirrors Messages Manifestations (1969), the only copy that could be located for loan to British Libraries was at the British Library in Boston Spa, which I was required to sign for in blood to be allowed to live with for a month. It certainly changed my photographic thinking at the time.

It was a Facebook post by film-maker and photographer Rina Sherman with a link to Minor Words: Photography and Writing by Michelle Dunn Marsh that sparked off my thoughts about Minor White and led to this post. Marsh’s article, mainly about his sequencing, includes a short sequence of his prints and was written as the first major retrospective of his work since 1987 is on show at the J Paul Getty Museum until October 19, 2014.

I had been thinking of writing more about White, but a little Googling found to my surprise something I had made earlier, one of my own articles on White, first published in two parts on another web site in 2001, as Minor White – Spiritual Journey and Minor White – Equivalents which save me the bother and may still be of some interest. But don’t expect any of the links to work after 13 years – and I gave up maintaining them in 2007.

It is slightly easier to find examples of White’s work on-line than it was when I wrote that piece, but there are still relatively few examples given his importance in photography.

There are some pictures on Luminous Lint, a usefully encyclopaedic site on photography, and also at major museums such as SFMoMA (only 10 of the 26 images in their collection have images on-line) and MoMA, but I was able to find very little at the Princeton University Art Museum which houses the Minor White Archive and has loaned 30 pictures to the retrospective. The largest collection on line is at the Art Institute of Chicago which has around 50 images on line, but on a disappointingly small scale.

There is of course an article about him on Wikipedia, and also some images on the Masters of Photography site as well as scattered images elsewhere across the web. You can also read John Szarkowski’s comments on White from ‘Looking at Photographs‘ where White’s Capital Reef, Utah, 1962 was reproduced, along with some other of his pictures at Atget Photography.

Work by Raymond Moore is harder still to find. His archive, prepared at considerable expense after his death by his young widow, Mary Moore Cooper, failed to find a buyer (another reflection of the lack of interest in the UK cultural establishment in photography) and his negatives, contact sheets made from them, drawings, correspondence, publications and between 700-1000 prints – estimated according to a Guardian article in 1990 to be valued at £440,000 – still so far as I know languishes in store at Sothebys.

Shocking Gaza – Romenzi

The news from Gaza has certainly been shocking, with now well over a thousand Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, including many children now known to be killed. Of course we should grieve too for the Israelis who have died – mainly soldiers – but the figures point to the disproportionality – this is not a war but an entirely out of proportion one-sided punishment of the population of Gaza. The consequences of the attacks on heavily populated city areas with the weapons being used – even if every one was accurately targeted – are inevitably large numbers of civilian deaths. If you’ve not seen it, watch Jon Snow‘s report which makes this crystal clear – though it does contain some disturbing images. I was pleased I wasn’t watching in HD.

Although I don’t find it easy to look at the pictures and videos which are coming out from Gaza, I think it is important that brave journalists are going there and sending them out. Today I read that another journalist I admire, Paul Mason, is now in Gaza and reporting for Channel 4.

One of the sets of photographs which brings home what is happening there to me appeared a few days ago in Time Lightbox, Innocents in the Crossfire: Alessio Romenzi’s Shocking Photographs From Gaza, work by a 40 year old Italian photographer who has spent the last five years in Israel and Palestine. There isn’t a great deal of gore in the images, though an enormous amount of destruction in the background, but for me they bring me very close to the people who are suffering in Gaza.

I’ve just spent two days photographing protests in London about what is happening in Gaza, and the realities of the situation seem now to be getting through – even through the media smokescreen that seems to prevent the BBC from hearing what its own reporters are telling it about the situation. One thing that impressed me about yesterdays protest – by around 50,000 people – was the strength of the feeling among many Jews in the protest that Israel – as one speaker put it – “is not behaving as a Jewish state should.” Over 600,000 people have read Naomi Wolf’s statement on Facebook about why she is “mourning genocide in Gaza.”

As I write this, the latest figures for the Palestinian deaths are 1032, with the BBC reporting the total number of Israeli deaths as 40 soldiers and two civilians. A Facebook post today pointed up the reason for these very different figures:

Israeli Tanks – 3930 – Palestinian Tanks – 0
Israeli F-16 Fighter Jets – Palestinian F-16 Fighter Jets – 0

By the time you read this, the figures for deaths will doubtless be higher. Surely it must be time for peace.

You can see more of Romenzi’s work from Gaza and elsewhere on his Photoshelter site.

Skinningrove

Although I’ve written a few times over the years about the work of Chris Killip, the problem that I’ve always faced is that so little of his work is visible on the web. Most of his books too are out of print*, though I have several on my shelves. Although in the last few years he has become a little more visible (and his show at the Photographers’s Gallery in 2013 was one of their lamentably few highlights in recent years) he remains rather obscure compared to many other photographers. (And no, he didn’t win the prize, which went to a pair of people who had made a book using other people’s images – which wasn’t without interest, but this is supposed to be a photography prize.)

Killip, a professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard where he has worked since 1991, has deliberately chosen to keep his photographs so far as possible away from the web – as his own web site clearly shows. I’m sure too that he could have done far more to make his work available in print. You can see an illustrated review of his Seacoal (apparently still available) on The Photobook, a three pictures from our ridiculously small Arts Council Collection in the UK National Archives, and rather more in various exhibition listings and reviews. You could also try a search using his name on Google Images, though as always not all the pictures this returns are by him.

Thanks to PetaPixel, and the short post Chris Killip, (mainly as it makes clear an excerpt from an Aperture interview with him) linking to a note in the NYRB, I’ve just been watching a short film, Skinningrove, with Killip speaking about and showing his work from this small North Yorkshire, fishing village. It’s well worth watching.

One of the pictures shows a secondary teacher with boys sketching on the beach, and Killip says that he is actually a photographer, who has to teach for a living, and names him as Ian Macdonald. You can see some of his work on Amber Online.

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*The paperback edition of ‘Isle of Man’ is likely to cost you £250 or more, with the hardback being rather more. I think ‘In Flagrante’ may cost around the same. There is also a study of ‘In Flagrante’ available from Errata Books rather more cheaply.

Arles Disaster?

You are almost sure to be aware that there is a photo festival every year at Arles. I’ve never been to it, though I’ve occasionally commented on what happened there, and have written about why I’ve not gone on several occasions. But rather than do so this year, I just want to refer you to a post on l’Oeil de la photographie Arles 2014: An Off Year? Worse—A Disaster!.

I should have gone to Arles perhaps 20 or more years ago, but then I was always busy with my students’ photography examinations at the time it took place, early in July. Since then the nature of this festival – and many others – have changed, as the article puts it “it’s becoming a buyer’s festival, that galleries and collectors and agents are crowding in, that deals are being made, that guys and girls from all over are bringing an astounding creativity to the “off” and “off-off” sections of the festival.”

That this is happening to the fringe is good in some ways – and particularly good for those photographers taking part. If you look at my reports on the several Paris Mois de la Photo I’ve attended I’ve written for this site you will have hear my thoughts that the activities on the fringe are generally much more interesting than the relatively few shows of the actual Mois, and certainly from the delear’s festival few days at Paris Photo.

In his editorial, Jean-Jacques Naudet writes:

“we’ve had enough of these veterans: enough Martin Parr, enough Raymond Depardon, enough Christian Lacroix, enough Erik Kessels. They’re all great, but their ubiquity has become unbearable. At this rate, if Hébel and the festival weren’t parting ways, then next year’s edition would have featured Martin Parr’s cookbook, Raymond Depardon’s garden gnomes and Christian Lacroix’s children’s toys.“

and he talks about the wild passions and outsized egos of recent years.

I’m not sure I agree when he says that one day we will want to revisit these – perhaps we will want only to revisit some aspects of some of them, and there are other parts we will want to bury our memories of. Well there are some of Depardon’s images I’ll be glad to see again, the garden gnomes are perhaps not among them, and although I admire some of Parr’s work, too often he appears to be trading on his reputation rather than than producing anything of great import. I’ve yet to see anything by Lacroix I’d want to revisit, but hopefully he will in time prove me wrong.

But somehow I hope that festivals like Arles which have such an important place in photography would become in some way more democratic and more varied – perhaps with the official festival becoming more like the fringe.

As well as the editorial there are of course other reports on Arles, both on the l’Oeil de la photographie and elsewhere, so you can read these and make up your own mind. The Guardian has a video review which seems to me to underline the vacuity of the event, and a set of the ‘finest shots on display in Provence’ which suggest that the best work was from the 1950s in Chile or perhaps a little later in with John Davies’s Elf Services, Autoroute A26, Nord-Pas-de-Calais (1988). It’s hard to believe there has been so little of worth produced in black and white (the theme of this year) since then. Actually we know this isn’t true.

Though perhaps it is worth asking why anyone should work in black and white now, when so many of the reasons we chose to do so in the past have gone. It’s perhaps relevant in this to point out that Peter Hugo’s slightly odd heads and shoulders images were actually taken in colour, then converted to bring out the melanin to black and white in Photoshop. And most of today’s black and white images were actually taken in colour, their conversion to monochrome more a stylistic fad than anything else.

I spent over 30 years working in black and white, thinking in black and white, as my primary medium. I worked in colour too, often only doing so for images where colour seemed particularly significant or indeed the subject of the image – I was certainly a colourist at heart in my colour work. Few if any photographers now seem to think in black and white. My own approach to colour has changed too, and I’m not sure I could satisfy myself with monochrome except for the very occasional image.

Stanley Greene

Although I’d undoubtedly seen photographs by Stanley Greene before then, it was only early in 2004 that I really became aware of him as a photographer, and my immediate reaction was to sit down and write an essay of over 2000 words, ‘Stanley Greene: Witness to the World‘, which I published on the web site I was writing for shortly after.

It is no longer available, but it is perhaps no great loss, being more a telling of the major phases of his life and work to that point than offering any real insight into his photography, and is really too long to include in a post here. Like much of what I wrote then it was cannibalised from the available information from a number of sources on the web and some in print, and I have no complaint that parts of it have in turn been recycled by other web sites (though often rather more lazily well on the wrong side of the borderline between research and plagiarism.)

Here at any rate is how I began the story of his life (with a reference to links removed):

Beginning

Harlem

Stanley Greene was born in Harlem, New York in 1949. His father, also Stanley Greene, had been a part of the ‘Harlem Renaissance‘ of the 1930s, an actor and an activist, who was blacklisted as a communist in the 1950s. He kept in the business only through minor roles in movies, his name not listed in the credits. Although his father encouraged the young Stanley to think of a career in acting, he decided he wanted to become a painter. His parents gave him a camera when he was 10 and he used the camera to photograph material for his painting.

Gene Smith

The teenage Greene also became politically active, joining the Black Panthers and taking part in the anti-Vietnam movement, refusing to serve there. In 1971 he met the famous photojournalist W Eugene (Gene) Smith, who encouraged him and offered him space in his studio. Smith advised him to study photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York to get a grasp of the technical side of the medium, and later to go to the San Francisco Art Institute where the focus was on aesthetics.

California and New York

In California, Greene photographed the music scene, sending pictures of new punk and rock bands to the music magazines. In the mid 70s he helped to found the Camera Works Gallery in San Francisco, and it was while curating a show for this that he made his first visit to Paris in 1976. Dissatisfied with his life in California, he moved back to New York in the early 1980s, taking a job with Newsday, one of the larger regional newspapers in the USA. He hated it, being constantly sent to cover such minor events as delicatessen openings.

Paris Fashion

Eventually, in 1986, he was fed up enough to decide more or less on a whim to go back and live in Paris, where he had met a group of photographers who styled themselves ‘poets of photography’. Greene became a fashion photographer. Despite his success and easy lifestyle – including a taste for heroin – he was not content, haunted by the ghost of Gene Smith and the nagging of his example and his advice to photographers “You have to give something back.”

I was reminded of this by a set of Greene’s early pictures, (Never Quiet) on the Western Front, published by Lensculture, none of which I’ve seen before, which set me off on revisiting much of his work around the web. As well as photographs there are also a number of articles about his work and interviews, and I thought again about the piece I had written in 2004 when I read in Stanley Greene’s Redemption and Revenge published by Lens in 2010 the photographer’s comment to the question of why he had brought out an autobiographical work:

“I wanted to set the record straight. I kept hearing people say, “Chechnya was when you really started to be a photographer.” And that’s not true. I was shooting back at the Berlin Wall, but nobody knew about it.“

And I thought, well those who read my piece a few years earlier certainly did – and knew too that you were a photographer before the Berlin Wall. And given that we were looking at around a million page views a month there were probably quite a few who had read at least the first few paragraphs even if they didn’t all struggle to the end of page 4.

So far I’ve only got halfway through the 25 minute interview with him in 2013 on Italian Vogue – though I’ll watch the rest later today, as he makes some interesting points. Including his observation “When you shoot film you really have time to think“. I don’t entirely agree with this, and perhaps he also weakens his own point by going on to say he seldom ‘chimps’ when working on digital. I try to remember to take a test picture at the start of each event I photograph to check things are working properly, but seldom look at the pictures again until I’m sitting on the train on my way home. Digital does give you the choice of being able to work differently – and in a way that I think as he does – divorces you from the situation, but you don’t have to take it.

There is a shorter interview with Green on PhotoRaw in which he also talks about digital and the attraction of film to him as well as about “Brains, guts, humanity” and the problems of being a photographer nowadays. It’s perhaps an interview that would have been better with just audio, or accompanied by a few stills, as I find the image of the photographer gets rather annoying after a minute or too.

You can of course view very many fine stories by him on Noor, the agency he was one of the founder members in 2007, one of several agencies that seem to be continuing the Magnum tradition rather better than Magnum.

Can You Help?

Having just read A D Coleman’s latest post (the ninth) in his series on Capa and the fictional account of the ‘ missing pictures’ from Omaha Beach on D-Day still being told by TIME, Magnum and the ICP – which includes the discovery of another video from TIME made in 2009 including another ‘faked’ image, I went to my e-mail to read a post from the Coleman, who asks if any readers of >Re:PHOTO can help to solve some of the mysteries of what actually happened to Capa’s film from the landing.

Here are Coleman’s four questions as he wrote them – please comment or email either to me or to Photocritic International if you can help.

1. Have any of them experienced, or heard from others working back then or since, a case of emulsion melt due to brief exposure to high heat in a drying cabinet or other situation? Any mention of such problems in the photo periodicals of the time?

2. Does anyone know, or know of, the mysterious teenage “darkroom lad” Dennis Banks, a/k/a/ Dennis Sanders?

3. Does anyone know, or know of, the London-based LIFE contract photographer Hans Wild*, who was present when the film was developed? Are there any interviews with him in which he discusses that event? Did anyone who knew him ever hear him talk about it?

4. According to Morris, he had 5 darkroom staffers present that night. If we take Wild and Banks/Sanders as two, that leaves three more who would have witnessed the consequences of the development and (if it happened) the emulsion melt. Does anyone know any of these people?

The video that has now been found on TIME was made in 2009 and includes in the middle of a strip of Capa’s pictures from D-Day one that is not by him. You can watch it better on Vimeo.

Image from Wikipedia, obtained by them from PD-Archives Normandie – not by Capa

It is a picture from the U.S. Coast Guard Collection in the U.S. National Archives taken at Omaha beach – you can see it better on Wikipedia in a differently cropped version and a somewhat cruder version on the US Naval History & Heritage site. There are also some other images there from Omaha beach. The photographer is not named.

The real question I ask is why anyone should want to insert this image (and insert it rather crudely) into a video about Capa. An honest video might also have made clear that the picture of men on a packed boat (at 0m50s) although taken by Capa was not from Normandy but from Dorset, and shows US soldiers being ferried to the larger ships that would take them across the Channel.

It would perhaps be churlish to object that the pictures of Capa in uniform were not taken on D-Day, and we would not expect him to have taken these themselves, but I don’t recognise the image of a ship from above (at 1m21s) as one of his, and rather than the overprint ‘TIME’ it should perhaps have had one to indicate its source. There are two pictures showing LCT 305 that are also probably from US Naval photographers at around 1m30s, then the picture that was re-used in the strip of Capa’s pictures. If you have more information about these it would also be of interest.

Cynthia Young, a curator at the International Photography Center in New York, annexes all these images into the Capa myth with her statement “So Capa was shooting with his camera for all of this.” But he wasn’t. He made four exposures from the landing craft before getting pushed into the water, then another eight on the beach, mainly holding his camera above his head and shooting ‘blind’ as the bullets passed over him. You can see these and others taken before and after June 6th on Magnum. Unlike the troops he could stay where he was flat on the sand in shallow water. I’m not sure how quickly after returning with his film Capa went back to the beaches, but one of the pictures on the Magnum page taken when he returned claims also to have been made on June 6th.

Young states that a soldier was assigned to take Capa’s films back, but that these films he took were lost, and the only ones that survived were those that were not picked up. THis is a part of the myth I’ve not heard before, and I think one that does not fit the analysis in Coleman’s series of articles. It’s while she is telling the myth about the emulsion melting off the film in the ‘drying rack‘ (whatever that is) that a slightly blurred crop of the mystery image above is explicitly presented as being by Capa. It’s a poor attempt at a forgery, being rather crudely pasted into the image strip, and not quite matching the look of the other images. As well as Cynthia Young, the blame for the misrepresentation must fall on Craig Duff who produced and edited the video, and thanks photo editor Mark Rykoff for his assistance with the images. Presumably Rykoff made clear to Duff that some of the images were not by Capa?

Does all this matter? Like Coleman I think it does. Photographs such as these are not just illustrations, but a witness statements. They say ‘I was there and this is what I saw’ and depend crucially on the integrity of the photographer – and on that of the others involved in bringing the image to public view. It matters for the same reasons that Reuters has a strict code on altering images – and fires photographers it finds to have breached it.

I think it’s also important in honouring the memory of photographers like Capa – who later died photographing another war – that we remember and value them for what they actually did, the truth about their lives and not fictions (a polite word for lies.) Finding out the true story of Capa on Omaha beach doesn’t lessen my admiration for what he did manage to do there – if anything it increase it by making me more aware of the problems that he faced. A friend I was talking with yesterday – and a former US Army photographer told me that in army training they were told that the average life of of photographer in a combat situation was twelve seconds.

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* A search on Getty images brings up 3,181 pictures apparently taken by Hans Wild, who had a very long career as the first claims to have been taken on 01 Jan 1900 (but from the subject matter clearly were not) and the latest on 21 Jul 2009. The earliest appear to date from the 1930s. Looking through the images I wonder if Hans Wild was not really a person at all, but a kind of wild card name, perhaps used for images taken by people who for contractual reasons were not named or whose names for some reason were not known. But I would like to be proved wrong!

More on Capa – Fraud

I’d not watched the Time video Behind the Photo in which LIFE picture editor John G. Morris talks through what happened when Capa’s 4 cassettes of 35mm film arrived at the offices in London’s Dean Street. Parts of A D Coleman‘s series of posts were based on the ‘ruined negatives’ that are displayed in that video as Morris talks.

I’d not looked at the ‘ruined negatives (stills of which which were reproduced in Coleman’s articles) closely, but photographer Rob McElroy did, and he noticed something very strange. What are presented as contact prints from the ruined negatives are clearly identical to the good negatives except that the image area has been whited out and the frame numbers removed. Simply a rather poor piece of Photoshop. Given that they have identical scratches and marks there can be no doubt that this is a crude forgery, and represents a clear attempt to deceive the viewer. You can read McElroy’s guest post on Photocritic International and the images in it are absolutely convincing.

On the video itself Morris actually gives a very clear description of the films, despite sticking to the fiction about them melting in the drying cabinet, when he says he “held up the rolls one at a time, and there was nothing on the first three rolls, but on the fourth roll there were 11 frames that had images…”

There was ‘nothing’ on the first three rolls. In other words they were just clear film. Greatly underexposed. Nothing to melt, nothing to be lost in the drying cabinet. Capa had underexposed the film that he took before the actual landing so badly that nothing was recorded. The contact prints from the actual negatives would have been black and not white. And of course the totally blank films were thrown away.

When Capa stood on the landing craft watching the soldiers making their way to the beach that there was enough light to record on the film, and when he was on the beach. Those were the frames that could be printed – and the only frames that he took of the actual landing.

In Part 8 of his series, Coleman accuses Adrian Kelterborn of Magnum Photos, in collusion with Cynthia Young of the International Center of Photography and Mia Tramz of TIME of deliberately concocting a fraud in “blatant violation of professional ethics in the field of photojournalism, as articulated in the Code of Ethics of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA)” and he posts a copy of his letter of complaint to Sean D. Elliott of the NPPA’s Ethics Committee urging an investigation of the matter. And as he says, surely John Morris must have seen and approved the final version of the video and thus share responsibility for the deception.