This morning A D Coleman published Episode 18 of his series Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, a series that with the help of others, particularly J. Ross Baughman, has explored what really happened to Robert Capa and the pictures that he took on Omaha Beach during the first day of the D-Day landings in 1944.
There is now no room for doubt that Capa only made 11 exposures on Omaha Beach on June 6 and the question has now moved on to who fabricated the myth of the darkroom accident and why, and the continuing defence of untenable positions by various of those involved – even now they grudgingly admit there were – or at least may have been – only 11 images.
Of course nothing in this whole saga diminishes Capa as a photographer, and we have always known that he was a great storyteller, and while photographs remain fixed, stories surrounding them always have a habit of growing with the telling, and the legend always affects and can sometimes come to overshadow the actual image.
What distinguishes this story is the speed at which it was elaborated (if inconsistently as Coleman demonstrates) and the mythic status it has gained in the history of photography. And those of us who have taught and written about the history of photography feel a certain betrayal at having been duped and a little shame at having passed it on to our students and readers. (Though in mitigation I think I usually put down the actual appearance of the ‘surviving’ images to factors other than darkroom damage while repeating what was the accepted lie of the loss of other pictures from the beach.)
As a journalist and a photographer, I have a strong conviction that truth matters, although of course recognising the subjectivity of my own viewpoint. What has emerged in Coleman’s investigations seems clear evidence of a deliberate construction of falsehood, of lies that don’t affect the actual photographs but have contributed to their status as icons. And lies that materially affected the careers of some of those involved, probably getting Capa the offer of a permanent job with LIFE, and, as Coleman also pointed out in Episode 17:
Were it not for the myth of the melted emulsions (and its potency as a visual image), Morris would be even more obscure as a relevant cultural reference point today than his boss at LIFE, Wilson Hicks, then the chief picture editor at that magazine, or Tom Hopkinson, editor of the British magazine Picture Post — names you rarely hear today outside of courses in the history of photojournalism. As it stands (or has stood until now), the dramatic emulsion-melt fable functions as the key moment in Morris’s professional life.
There are lies that matter – and lies that don’t. All of us regularly tell plenty of the second type, and most of Capa’s ornamentations in his writing are harmless and amusing – as they were meant to be. This was something different, something deliberately intended to mislead and which succeeded in doing so with such a powerful effect on our perceptions of the history of photography. Even though we now know as a lie, there is no way we can cancel the distortion it has caused.