Re-photo

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!

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2014 at 08:44 am and is filed under Photo Issues, Photographers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.