I didn’t buy the book ‘The Concerned Photographer‘ (or rather ‘the concerned photographer‘) when it came out in 1968 for various reasons. Possibly I was aware of its existence, and of the show of which it was a catalogue (at the Riverside Museum in New York and then touring) which I suspect got some coverage in the English newspapers, if not at the time then when it was the first show at London’s then new Photographers’ Gallery in 1971. It almost certainly featured in Amateur Photographer which I used to call into the public library to read each week in one of my lunch breaks. I can’t at this distance in time recall if I made the journey down from Leicester, where I was then living, to London to see the show, though I think I probably did, and certainly later in the decade after I moved closer to London I was a regular visitor to the gallery (and have remained a member – with slight gaps due to a chaotic membership system – to this day, despite a feeling it has lost sight of its purpose.)
The main reason I won’t have bought it back in 1968 was poverty. I was a graduate student, living on a grant and a small amount from student supervisions which came to roughly half the income I’d been earning before I went back to college. It was a more fortunate age than today’s students face, and I had just enough to live on, but there was nothing to spare. Though I was keen and interested in photography I couldn’t afford film and processing – except for perhaps one film a year taken on a short ‘holiday’ usually spent staying with my or my wife’s parents in London or Hull, or on day trips to countryside close to Manchester.
When I finally bought the book, it wasn’t for Robert Capa, but primarily for the work of Dan Weiner, relatively little of which was available elsewhere, unlike Capa and some of the others featured such as Kertesz. It’s a fairly solid book, but annoyingly designed with no page numbers, the photographer’s contributions designated by alternate blocks of black and white page edges – Werner Bischof’s pictures on white backgrounds, Capa’s on black, then Kertesz on white, Chim on black, Weiner white and finally Freed on black.
Capa’s section has I think 27 photographs, including of course his ‘Falling Soldier’, judged so important the facing page which precedes it is left blank black. Following it is a double page spread with two of his images each with the simple caption ‘D-Day, Omaha Beach. June 6th 1944‘. These are captions which break the design norm for the book – the ‘Falling Soldier’ is simply captioned ‘Spain, 1936‘ and other images follow that same pattern – under which they would have been captioned ‘France, 1944‘. It clearly positions these works as something rather special.
The book has a fine selection of Capa’s work, though perhaps I would have preferred the images to have been in chronological order rather than the seemingly random jumping from conflict to conflict which a few other images thrown in.
The book begins with an introduction by Cornell Capa, and each photographer gets a short introduction about their life, work and influence, and after the photographs there are short section in which each photographer or others comment on their work. Capa had of course died 14 years earlier, and his comments come from his writing, I think mainly from his “autobiographical novel” written in 1946, ‘Slightly Out of Focus‘.
Only one image from D-Day is given its stamp-sized reproduction and comment:
“I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, beter pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but that at this stage of the game having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not to be executed for it is his torture. The was correspondent has his stake – his life – in his hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.
I am a gambler. I decided to go with Company E in the first wave.”
We now know that Capa actually went with the second wave, and had the good fortune to arrive on a part of the beach where because of a seam in the defences – according to military historian Charles Herrick’s account – enemy fire was ‘relatively ineffective‘. Herrick tells the story of a surgeon who landed with Capa and was also a “victim of the psychological effects of enemy fire“. But the difference between the situation of the two men was that for the surgeon, “the regimental commander quickly approached, ordering the doctor to get his medical detachment up and follow him…” Capa as the quote from him above states, had his life in his own hands – and decided to “put it back in his pocket” after a relatively short time and ten or eleven nervous exposures on the beach. He was being a good gambler – if not at that moment a good war photographer – and who can blame him. It was an error for which he atoned greatly in his other work, and his gambler’s luck was very much on his side, helped considerably by others, so far as those few D-Day images were concerned.
This post was prompted by A D Coleman’s mention of ‘the concerned photographer‘ in Alternate History: Robert Capa and ICP (3), part of the continuing Robert Capa D-Day Project.
Whilst I have nothing but admiration for the work of A D Coleman in extracting every factual detail of the story my empathy lies with Capa. The invention of the “darkroom incident/accident” was concocted without his knowledge and to back track on it would have placed colleagues in a difficult position not to mention of course his reputation.
Where did I read that if there had been 60 perfectly exposed and focussed images none of them would be known today? In contrast, and by pure chance, those few snatched images are iconic and convey with great power the emotion of the time?
I think many of us have said/written statements like that you mention. And in a post a couple of week ago I’ve written a little about the pictures http://re-photo.co.uk/?p=6233 and Capa’s luck. Capa was a great gambler, but in this case his luck was I think entirely fortuitous – he wasn’t trying to make pictures like those he came up with.
I don’t think that Coleman’s work in any way diminishes Capa’s work, but it does reflect badly on some of the major institutions of our medium and some individuals in them.
It’s also interesting in thinking about the relation between image and caption. Had Capa actually captioned his pictures accurately (and the same may well apply to ‘Falling Soldier’) I think they might have been seen rather differently over the years.