I’ve not always been the greatest fan of photography’s oldest magazine, the British Journal of Photography, though I was a subscriber for over 20 years, but there are often things it does very well. One of them is a feature by Dimitri Beck, editor in chief of Polka magazine, (whose Paris gallery and offices I visited last November for a show by Daido Moryami), an interview with deservedly the best-known photographic editor of the last century, John G Morris.
Now 96, Morris is still working with photographers, but the occasion for the article is the showing for the first time of the photographs he made himself in Normandy in 1944, a month after the Normandy landings, when, keen to see things for himself, rather than staying at the Life Magazine London offices, he invented the job of ‘pool editor for Western Front’ and went out daily with the Life photographers for 4 weeks, taking his Rolleiflex with him and shooting a dozen rolls of film.
The pictures, being shown until Sept 15 at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, certainly evoke the era and place from the few examples I’ve seen and show he was proficient as a photographer, but rather pale beside the iconic images from others that he edited.
If you are not familiar with the story of Morris, the film Eleven Frames, directed by Douglas Sloan gives some idea of his work and has Morris himself telling the story of Capa’s D-Day pictures. You can also see a video interview made earlier this year with him by Alessia Glaviano on Vogue Italy.
Morris’s autobiography, Get the Picture: a Personal History of Photojournalism was first published in 1998, came out as a paperback in 2002 and has since appeared in various languages and is still available.