>Re-PHOTO

I’ve mentioned before l’Oeil de la photographie, or as I should probably call it now that it seems to have fully sorted out its English version The Eye of Photography, and for those of us not in Arles, its perhaps one of the best ways to follow the festival.
Today’s editorial (July 8, 2016) by Jean-Jacques Naudet, Photography is dead, long live the image! is an interesting introduction, with its second paragraph announcing the end of much that made me reluctant as a photographic outsider to attend:

‘All of a sudden, we, the dinosaurs, the old hands, feel a bit lost. Gone are the eternal meetings, incestuous and mortifying, which one had to attend annually since the beginning of the century: such-and-such lunch, a BMW events, a wink from Madame So-and-So, tips from Olympus over tea, dinners with Pictet and after-hour drinks with Picto!’

I’m not sure I believe it, those dinosaurs have a remarkable resilience, but then I’m sitting a long way away, living through ‘interesting times’ in London. Given our Brexit vote, perhaps I should give it all up and move to the south of France while I still can and hope I’ll be allowed to stay after our break becomes final.

Lower down the page on ‘l’Oeil‘ (I’m afraid the English short-form ‘Eye‘ is long taken by a magazine of a rather different nature, where you can often read the truth behind British politics that the establishment would prefer was kept private but lacks much appreciation of photography) you can follow links to some of the exhibitions and events you are missing. I’m not worried about missing Don McCullin‘s show as I doubt it has anything to add to what I’m already familiar with, powerful though some of his images are, but there are other shows that I’d love to be able to stroll into, and I’ve just wasted some minutes on walking around the city on Google Streetview – which makes me wish I was there rather than in front of my computer on a dull morning on the edge of London. Perhaps a little later I’ll sit in the garden and treat myself to a glass of wine, close my eyes and dream.

But then I’ll have to wake up, rejoin the real world and pick up my camera bag to cover a rally opposite Downing St against the continuing siege of Gaza and an end to the UK’s arms trade with Israel.

One of the meaner and crazier cuts planned by the Tory government is the proposal to axe the NHS student bursaries. There are good reasons why nursing students etc get a bursary while undergoing their training, but on 25 November an announcement was made that from 1 August 2017, new nursing, midwifery and allied health students will no longer receive NHS bursaries.

Apart from nurses and midwifes the list includes some specialities I would have to look up, but here it is in full:

Chiropodist, Podiatrist, Operating Department Practitioner, Dental Hygienist/Dental Therapist, Orthotist/Prosthetist, Orthoptist, Dietitian, Physiotherapist, Radiographer, Radiotherapist, Speech and Language Therapist and Occupational Therapist.

Currently there are awards which cover (up to certain limits) tuition fees, as well as maintenance, in part means-tested and reduced by expected contributions from parents or partners. It’s a complicated scheme, and not particularly generous, but it does allow many students who would otherwise be unable to train, particularly mature students, to do so.

Instead of bursaries,  in future NHS students will have to rely on student loans – and end their courses with large debts which will have to be repaid.

Student nurses don’t just go to lectures and take notes. Much of there time is spent actually in hospitals looking after patients just as they will do when they have finished their training. They learn on the job, and are an essential part of the provision of services for patients. They  are doing useful and necessary work for the NHS and deserve to be recompensed for it.

Because of the long shifts they work in hospital, student nurses have far less opportunity to supplement their  income with part-time work than other students.

We have a shortage of nurses and many hospitals have to advertise overseas and bring in trained nurses from abroad. We simply do not train enough. Health Minister Jeremy Hunt wants to cut the cost of training by axing bursaries, making it possible to offer more training places; but doing so will certainly make it much harder for many students to take up the places, and will penalise all those who train for these vital jobs, who will suffer hardship while training and also have to continue paying back their loans long into their careers.

Nursing isn’t a career that people go into for the money,  and it involves a great deal of work at unsocial hours. It seems unfair to further penalise them by removing the bursaries.  The protests are being led by current nursing students from Kings College, and supported by those from elsewhere as well as across the whole medical professions. The changes will not affect those currently studying, but only new students from 2017, and the protests are because they see the effect it will have on future generations of students, and also on the NHS.

Continue reading Bursary or Bust

A day or two ago on Petapixel I read a fascinating story ‘1200 Rolls of Unprocessed Film Found‘ which took me to Indiegogo to find out more.

There Levi Bettwieser, the founder and film technician for The Rescued Film Project, writes:

Around 1 year ago, we acquired 66 bundles of film. Each bundle contains anywhere from 8-36 rolls of film, totaling what we’re estimating to be about 1,200 rolls, all shot by the same photographer in the 1950s.

Bettweiser goes on to explain how the film was extremely carefully and systematically wrapped up, although not in any truly archival fashion. But back in the 1950s people were generally pretty clueless about exactly how to preserve photographic material of any kind – and even companies like Kodak were selling colour film that we would now regard as highly unstable, and making colour prints that faded almost as fast as Wedgewood’s unfixed images on leather (which as my late friend Terry King demonstrated by making an image in a similar way, would keep for quite a few years if only briefly taken out of its black bag for the occasional viewing.)

Fortunately the photographer concerned used black and white film, which even then had fairly good keeping qualities. Although it’s still best to process film shortly after exposure, a few years of post-exposure storage in a sealed and chemically neutral environment like a film can makes little difference. I’ve still got a few films from around ten years ago, some of the last few I took, that I’ve not got around to developing. I keep meaning to process them, but somehow never seem to have the time. I sent some of them that were taken on chromogenic films off for C41 processing last year and they were fine.

The photographer who took these pictures went to considerable trouble, replacing the exposed films in the box in which they were sold. Those shown in the picture on-line are Kodak 620 Panatomic-X films, a format that disappeared in the 1990s, with film and backing paper identical to that on 120 film but wound around a much slimmer spindle. This tells us virtually nothing, as many cameras were made to use the format, from Box Brownies to more sophisticated models such as the twin-lens reflex Argus C40 and folders such as the Kodak Vollenda 620 which had a 10.5cm Leitz Elmar f4.5 lens which were capable of entirely professional results.

Putting the film back in its printed card boxes was not a good idea, and neither was including “a hand written note detailing what was shot” inside the aluminium foil which then swathed the package. Wrapping this in “athletic tape” will have helped in sealing the package, but may also have introduced substances that might damage the film. It did allow labelling on the outside of the package, which appears also to have been done meticulously. 620 film, like 120 film, could be used in different format cameras, giving 8 exposures in a 6×9 (cm) camera (or its imperial equivalent) and 12 on 6×6. That the photographer appears to have recorded that one roll had 12 exposures perhaps suggests he had more than one camera with different formats.

Further archival sins were to then pack these wrapped films into wooden cigar boxes (presumably the photographer had connections in the cigar trade, or he would have died from nicotine poisoning before finishing this work)  and then wrapping these in newspaper covered with yet more foil and tape. And then presumably put into storage.

It is certainly the work of an obsessive, though his or her motivations are unclear, and although we may suspect Bettwieser knows more, he isn’t telling. According to the Petapixel article, all he knows is that his “name was Paul and that he was a steel worker“. Certainly the work would appear to be an incredible time capsule, but we can’t really assess whether it is of any real interest, either in photographic or in social terms as so far only one of the estimated 1200 rolls appears to have been processed. The six pictures from that one roll appear to show us work that would be largely of interest to Paul’s grandchildren, though perhaps the 50 rolls that have now been sent off with reveal something of more value.

I’d certainly want to know more before making a donation to the appeal for $15,000 to get the rest of the films processed – though as I write, the project is well over half-funded with 2 months to go and seems likely to reach its goal. And unlike the Rescued Film Project I don’t believe that all photographs are worth preserving – it may well be that the best place for most of these 66 bundles of films is landfill. Others share some of my scepticism, as you can see from the comments about the project on Digital Photography Review.

On the RFP web site are the two statements:

Copyright of the collection of images on this website is Owned By The Rescued Film Project.
Duplication of Any Images Without Prior Consent is Prohibited.

Like me, you may be wondering about this, as copyright – except in some cases of work for hire, or where the photographer has assigned it – belongs to the photographer, even if they are unknown, and when the photographer is deceased it becomes a part of his estate.

I find on their web site that when  you send unexposed film to the Rescued Film Project, you have to include a signed form which states that by “donating your film you are granting The Rescued Film Project full print/publish copyright of recovered images.” In return they promise to “email you a digital copy of all discernible images for your personal use.

It’s perhaps a fair exchange for getting your family snaps free, but it does make me think that if Paul or his heirs who donated the film really thought the images were of any real worth they would not have given them away. Or if they came from some third party, although they owned the material, they may well not own the copyright, though you would need to ask a lawyer to be sure. If it turns out they are worth something, we may see an interesting court case.

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.

We are by now rather used to hearing about various environmental disasters connected with BP, most notably the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, widely accepted as the  ‘worst environmental disaster‘ in US history. On the pages of Platform you can read their  Picture This which looks at 25 years of BP from 1989-2014, listing for each year just the major incident or political shenanigans from each year that blackens their record – beginning with the Exxon Valdez shedding between 260,000 and 750,000 barrels of crude into the fragile coastal ecosystem of Alaska and travelling around the world, including Azerbaijan, Colombia,  the North Sea, Papua New Guinea, Algeria, Ukraine, Canada, Libya and Iraq as well as the US.

The latest entry, for 2014, was as follows:

In March BP’s Whiting refinery in Indiana spilled between 470 and 1228 gallons of crude oil into Lake Michigan, a drinking water source for some seven million Chicago residents. The refinery has also been criticised for being responsible for huge black mountains of ‘high-sulfur, high-carbon risk petcoke’ along the Calumet River, a by-product of tar sands production.

Next door to that Whiting refinery is the ‘historic’ US town, Marktown, ‘built in 1917 by Chicago Industrialist Clayton Mark Sr. and was designed to be used as housing for his rapidly expanding Indiana Harbor Works of the Mark Manufacturing Company of Evanston, Illinois.’

According to an article on the New York Times Lens blog, Surrounded by Industry, a Historic Community Fights for Its Future, BP has been buying up properties in Marktown and demolishing them with the intention of demolishing the entire area,  one which (to quote from Wikipedia)

‘is regarded as an important cultural resource of architectural and historical significance. In the words of the Marktown Revitalization Plan commissioned by the city of East Chicago in 2008, “Marktown is significant as it is a major work by a significant American architect, Howard Van Doren Shaw, for its association with the driving economic force of industry that served as an identity of the region, and is representative of the planned industrial community movement of the late 19th and early 20th century.’

The Lens article by David Gonzalez looks at the photographs in this small, isolated and tightly bonded community by Alyssa Schukar, a Chicago freelancer whose work on women’s American football gained her third place in the 2014 World Press Photo for Sports feature stories.

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This was a story about BP I’d not heard before, although I’ve photographed a number of protests related to their other activities, such as a protest against the BP Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline in 2006, the Canadian Tar Sands Oily-Olympics and a Picket for Colombian Oil Workers in 2010, the fabulous Rev Billy’s BP Tate Exorcism in 2011 (picture above)

up to last December’s End BP’s British Museum Greenwash, and most recently of all an image or two of Greenpeace’s splendid ‘Sinking Cities’ banners on the British Museumm’s portico last month. There are too many protests to list them all, but you can see more from a search on My London Diary for ‘BP’.
Continue reading BP and Marktown

If like me you can’t get to Arles, you can at least see something of what will be happening there on Lensculture’s Editors’ Preview: Les Rencontres d’Arles 2016.

I’ve never been to Arles for ‘Les Rencontres‘ for various reasons. When it might have made most sense for me to attend I was always still busy as a full-time teacher and examiner in early July and it just wasn’t possible. It fits in fine for those in Higher Education, but the dates didn’t work for those of us in lower ed.

After I moved from teaching to being a full-time photographer and writer, it would have been possible, and I did make some half-hearted attempts to persuade one or two of my photographer friends that it would be a good idea to go there, as I didn’t like the idea of going on my own. But it seemed to coincide with a few years when Arles seemed have lost its way, and I couldn’t persuade them it was worth the time and expense. And perhaps I couldn’t really persuade myself either.

This year’s event, the 47th, does look more interesting than many. The opening week of Arles 2016 is July 4th-10th, and doubtless there will be much online about it. The exhibitions continue until 25th September, so if you happen to be in the South of France it may be ‘worth a detour.’

I’ve not been to the city since the early 1970s, shortly after the festival began, but I was there at Easter, generally a rather better time to visit the South of France. My thoughts at the time were rather more about Van Gogh than photography (and we spent considerably more time in Cezanne’s territory to the east around Aix en Provence and Mont Sainte Victoire, where we got lost in the clouds.)

Also taking place in Arles is Voies Off, a kind of festival fringe, which seen from the web has often seemed to have some exhibitions of more interest than the official festival.

There is an Arles page on Lensculture, which has links to their preview of last year’s festival and also to the 45th festival in 2014.

I’ve just been staring at 97% for over 5 minutes, attempting to install the latest iteration of Photoshop CC (2015.5) and am beginning to wonder a) if it will ever complete, and b) why I bothered, at least until plenty of others had already done so and had time to point up the problems.

I wrote the above sentence a couple of days ago, and can happily report that shortly after I’d finished doing so, the installation did complete successfully, though not without leaving me with a few problems. It really shouldn’t be beyond the wit of Adobe to write an installer that copies over the plug-ins from one version to the next – or at least to give us a message reminding us that we need to do so – and opening the relevant folders.

But at least this time Photoshop came up looking more or less the same as before, whereas at least one recent update resulted in a quite different workspace and panicking before I found how to select ‘Photography’ at the top right.

As well as problems with plug-ins, I’ve also had to sign out of Creative Cloud using Photoshop and then sign back in again. I think also that some of my colour settings have been lost or altered and probably there are a few other problems I’ll come across. I don’t have a problem with Adobe making sure we are paying for their software, but I do wish they had a system that worked without these hiccoughs.

It does seem to have been worth doing this upgrade, as Photoshop does seem to be working a little more snappily, keeping up better with my stylus as I move around retouching the black and white scans I’ve been working on.

I’ve been working over the last few weeks on scanning some of my black and white negs from the 1970s and 80s in Hull. I’d done quite a few for the Blurb book ‘Still Occupied – A view of Hull’, published in 2011 which has 270 photographs – which you can see in the on-line preview, but I’m intending to put up a web site, and went thought the work again to see if there were images that I’d missed. Retouching the scans took rather a long time, but was made much faster now with the Spot Healing Brush tool than it was when I worked on the earlier pictures using Photoshop 7.

And last week my wife asked me for a picture for a card with a Dutch theme, “Something with windmills“. While I do have some pictures from our last visit to Holland in 1981 which would fit, they are are colour transparencies and probably hidden somewhere in the loft; finding, scanning and cleaning up the scans from them would have been something of a challenge, so I went instead for a black and white of a canal in Amsterdam. Looked at on the contact sheet it was fine, but when I opened up the scan sitting on my network-attached storage I found a problem.

Like many of my old negatives, this one had suffered greatly from when my storage cabinet in the darkroom had become home to an infestation of minute bugs, who crawled their way across the negatives munching tracks through the gelatin, leaving behind their excreta, dead bodies and body parts. I’d actually seen some of them wandering across negatives in the enlarger, and their mates – or something very similar – would occasionally pop up in the viewfinder when I put a camera to my eye. The faint tracery of their trails was made very visible in the dark areas of the images, and the effect differed greatly from frame to frame, even on the same strip of film.

This one was so bad that I’d actually abandoned all hope of rescuing it using Photoshop 7, where the most effective retouching method was the clone tool. But although the scan is by no means perfect I was able to rescue it to a usable level with around half an hour of work, mainly with the Spot Healing Brush  in content-aware mode.

One thing I’d really like Adobe to improve in Photoshop is the Dust & Scratches filter, which seems rather better at removing detail and sharpness than dust spots or scratches. Fifteen or so years ago I installed the Polaroid plugin filter that did the same job, but rather more effectively. Unfortunately that 8-bit filter no longer seems to work in recent versions of Photoshop. I don’t need most of the other new features, but I’d certainly welcome a better version of this.

Continue reading Photoshop News

Lying on my floor at the moment is a thick tome with along its 44mm wide black spine has the single word ‘PROVOKE‘ in large white sans-serif caps, 30mm high. It weighs in at a tad over 2 kg (4lb 63/4 oz for those who like my wife still think in the old way) and a fair proportion of that must be the ink on its many black pages.

This is not a work for lovers of the fine zone system print, with most of its images being pretty stark black and white – and mainly black, but it is perhaps one of the more important photographic publications of recent months if not years. I wrote briefly about it and the show in Switzerland it accompanies a few weeks ago, and sat down to order it online as cheaply as possible from anyone except Amazon, and it arrived a few days later. Its actually available rather more cheaply from the US, but its weight makes carriage expensive and I bought it from a UK dealer.

Its on the floor mainly because I’ve run out of space on the many bookshelves in my home, and run out of space on the walls for more bookshelves. I have a kind of rule now, though I don’t always keep to it, that I only buy books with images by photographers I know, and this work just about squeezes into that category as I briefly met and got to know Eiko Hosoe back in 2005 in Poland – and took a number of pictures of him.

But its also there on the floor close to my computer to remind myself that I intended to write a review of it. I’ve picked it up – good exercise – and slowly leafed through some of its 680 pages several times in the last couple of weeks, but somehow that review has never materialised. But Jörg M. Colberg (who doubtless got a review copy rather earlier than my order arrived) has written a very fine one on  Conscientious Photography Magazine that makes my intended labour superfluous – and I commend it to you.

Provoke, a short-lived magazine, reproduced as one section of the book was part of a wider movement, a movement that started, as the first part of the book exemplifies (its full title Provoke – Between Protest and Performance is also a description of the volume’s layout) in the photography of post-war protest in Japan. Part of the reason for the high-contrast, grain and blur comes from the difficulties of covering these events, often at night or in poor light with a great amount of movement, requiring photographers working with 400 ASA or slower black and films to use lenses wide open and to push process them to extremes; but it was also an aesthetic that sat well with the Japanese tradition of calligraphy, and mirrored the extreme emotions of the moment. And Japanese art has a strongly graphic tradition which these images continue – as does the design of their publications.

The images were also a part of the protests, published often in the kind of crudely published leaflets and magazines that still often accompany protests, where cost is paramount and image quality goes by the board. Cheap litho or photocopying works best with images with few intermediate tones.

Colberg brings out the important discussion of the difference between a language and a style which this book makes clear, picking a particularly significant quote from an essay by Nakahira Takuma:

“William Klein’s work differs from that of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank in one key aspect: Klein thinks of photography as a method of searching and recognizing, as a plan for adventure in an endless world. Cartier-Bresson and Frank think of it as a means of direct expression of a specific view on the world or on life, such as the viewpoint are lonely and miserable.”

Both the book Provoke and Colberg’s review raise interesting issues, and issues of relevance to photographers now. As Colberg says, the Provoke photographers wanted photography to play an important role in society, and photographers today can learn from them by wanting to do more, by “doing something, by brushing against the grain, by making pictures that, at least to you, mean something” rather than “whining or whimpering, or by fighting over the tiny crumbs someone with a lot of money and/or power might throw at you“.

Amen.

Yesterday was World Refugee Day, and the guys at LensCulture put together an excellent collection of 13 related projects in Recognizing World Refugee Day 2016 showing different ways in which photographers have reacted to the situation.

Proud to Protect Refugees – celebrating the 60th anniversary of the UN Convention
on Refugees and the start of Refugee Week in 2011.

Although I’ve photographed numerous events related to refugees over the years (the earliest on My London Diary are two events in 2005, though I think there were earlier events I took on film), I stayed at home yesterday, although there was at least one event in London I could have gone to photograph. I hope to cover another later in the week, which is World Refugee Week, though that’s something that has been rather lost in all the publicity about our referendum.

Or rather the Conservative Party’s referendum – and it does seem a terrible insult to democracy that we should be having to face the possible consequences of leaving Europe over what is essentially a Conservative spat. I’m not a great admirer of the EU, but being in it is better than being out and run by people like Boris, Gove and Farage. I just hope not too many turkeys vote for Christmas on their false promises.

Refugees are Welcome Here march, September 2015

There seems to me to be something strange that those politicians who are most in favour of the freedom of movement of goods and services are those that have the greatest opposition to the free movement of people. And surely there is something obscene in having strict controls on immigration – but letting people who are rich enough come in without restriction. And letting people with no intention of coming here own properties simply as investments, keeping them empty as “buy to leave” properties while we have a desperate shortage of homes.

At the moment it seems impossible to avoid politics here, and every picture I take is a political statement or question. But perhaps that’s life. At least I find it more interesting than photographing cats and food. And I hope you do too.

Continue reading Refugee Week 2016

It’s hard to understand the refusal of parts of the photography establishment, particularly the ICP (founded by Robert Capa‘s younger brother Cornell) and Magnum, to accept the detailed and thoroughly researched findings of A D Coleman and his team, including both photographic and military experts, into the story behind Capa’s D-Day pictures.

Perhaps the only explanation is that there is more still to hide, and Coleman’s latest post at Photocritic International, Alternate History: Robert Capa and ICP (1), promises to make clearer the role of the ICP not just in promulgating and valorising the myths about his D-Day pictures, but also to comment on the “comparable dishonesty tainting other Capa scholarship to date subsidized and/or sponsored by ICP“.

Of course Capa’s D-Day pictures remain. They were taken on the landing craft and beach in Normandy, if only from the edge of a relatively safe landing area, from which Capa took an early chance to leave after only exposing a handful of frames. There is a great paradox in that had Capa been more in control, his images would have lacked the rawness and immediacy that they have. Imagine them sharp and detailed, without the camera shake and they would be rather ordinary pictures of a military landing, probably those particular frames not standing out from others that might have been made as the photographer followed the advance up the beach.

As it is, the roughness of these images correlates in an extraordinary and entirely fortuitous fashion to Capa’s own emotional state, itself an entirely human reaction to the situation he found himself in. Capa wasn’t a soldier, and although he had photographed war before, this was on a larger scale, with greater noise and confusion, his panic is certainly understandable – even rational, though not what was expected of a war photographer working for Life.

That those few images that he managed to take on that morning came out so well was clearly a matter of luck, though that they came out at all reflected his experience as a photographer – even with shattered nerves he made camera settings that were at least somewhere close. But many great photographs need a little luck to raise them above the mundane.

Remarkably, Capa was able to force himself to get back to France and taking pictures very soon after this experience; I suspect that within minutes of leaving the beach he realised that he had failed and needed to pull himself together and get back as soon as possible. He can have had no idea at the time that his few exposures by their very faults would be turned into powerfully expressive images.

John Morris, when he saw those images, along with the more ordinary pre-invasion pictures also sent by Capa, appears to have realised their special quality, but also clearly would have seen that Capa would have been expected to turn in a far fuller story, and that the true story behind them would not reflect well on either Capa or the judgement of whoever had sent him to take them. And having invented the story which made his career it was certainly hard to admit it was false.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry on Robert Capa still state “While under constant fire, Capa took 106 pictures, all but eleven were destroyed in a photo lab accident back in London.” The same fiction is also found in the entry The Magnificent Eleven. About time that these entries were corrected by someone – or have perhaps the photography establishment so far managed to veto this? On another page there is a discussion of the ‘Falling Soldier‘ image which does at least mention the various theories, including a claim that the picture was actually taken by Gerda Taro rather than Capa.