Twenty Pounds of Headlines Stapled to His Chest: Unbranding Robert Capa
Robert Dannin asks if Capa’s iconic D-Day photographs are all they seemed, and reviews A.D. Coleman's award-winning investigation of Capa for what it teaches us about contemporary photojournalism.
Introduction
Eighty years after the Supreme Allied Expeditionary Forces launched Operation Overlord, the invasion of Nazi-occupied France, no one disputes the military facts. After more than a year of planning, the United States Army Commanding General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered a 1,200-plane aerial bombardment of German positions as a prelude to a strategic amphibious assault that began on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when a 5,000-vessel armada crossed the English Channel depositing approximately 160,000 troops and their heavy weapons on the beaches of Normandy. By the end of August, more than two million Allied troops swarmed through Nazi-occupied France. From their initial, treacherous slog across the Wehrmacht’s coastal fortifications to the liberation of Paris, journalists recorded the conflict in print and photographs, published with an urgency necessary to sustain political support despite the massive allied casualties still visible today in the vast cemeteries of northern France.
Interpretations of the action beginning at H-Hour (06:00) and thereafter have varied according to eyewitnesses and their respective points of contact with the enemy. Some beaches were more heavily defended than others; Allied planes and naval artillery bombarded German coastal positions yet often missed their targets. Eisenhower’s plans had called for amphibious tanks to propel themselves onto the beaches and protect the infantry battalions disembarking behind them. Under battle conditions, however, the seagoing transports deployed their tanks miles offshore, and approximately two dozen vehicles sank immediately, and their crews drowned. Without this anticipated heavy-armor cover, infantrymen wading through the surf became sitting ducks for German rockets and machine guns. Many were killed in their boats before hitting the water. To remedy the chaos unfolding onshore, naval destroyers closed within range of the cliffs, where their big guns eventually stifled the enemy’s deadly fire. More German strongholds were knocked out by American troops who penetrated inland through narrow channels or boldly clambered up the bluffs with grappling hooks and rope ladders. The sector known as Omaha Beach was secured by the end of the day with a grim body count of nearly 2,000 American fatalities.
Several images of the assault on Omaha Beach by the Hungarian-born photojournalist Robert Capa were disseminated worldwide.1 They quickly became the iconic representations of martial valor under withering enemy fire. These D-Day photos contributed to Capa’s celebrity yet, upon closer inspection by discerning experts, also raised questions about Capa’s professional competence. Only ten. Why so few? Where was the rest of his film? When did he arrive, and how long did he remain on the beach amidst the fighting? What did the pictures graphically depict? Amphibious battalions decimated by German defenders, corpses bobbing on the choppy waves, frightened soldiers cowering behind metallic obstacles? Or skilled combat engineers rigging explosives to blast open a watery path through the rising tides?
Despite ample time to gather his thoughts and verify his observations with fellow eyewitnesses while returning to the English coast that same day, Capa inexplicably failed to submit detailed captions of these events. Aside from the image of troops stumbling into the surf from their landing craft, his other pictures were ambiguous and open to speculative interpretations, whether depicting the chaotic situation in the surf where the Germans had planted mines and iron “hedgehogs” (metal obstructions resembling giant toy jacks) or the action around the surviving tanks that crawled slowly up the wet sand. Eschewing reportorial accuracy, his singular mission was getting the D-Day films to his editor, John Morris, at Life Magazine in London. A half-hour to forty-five minutes after landing, Capa made his way back to his mothership, the USS Chase, and returned to England in the company of many wounded soldiers. Upon docking at the Channel port of Weymouth he found a courier to rush his film to London and then, having met his deadline, hopped another ship back to Normandy to rejoin the invading forces.
Capa’s subsequent coverage tracked the allied military campaign to the end of the war and yielded unforgettable images, among them the liberation of Paris, the shaming of female collaborators in the streets of Chartres, and “The Last Man to Die,” his agonizing shot of an American sniper killed in Leipzig on April 18, 1945. Dramatic as they were, however, these photos and others never displaced the invasion scene at Omaha Beach in the popular imagination.
The Critique of Capa
Were Capa’s iconic D-Day photographs all they seemed? Not according to Alternate History, Robert Capa on D-Day, an award-winning critical inquiry conducted by A.D. Coleman and his associates. Comprising more than 130 posts written between 2014 and 2023, the research reveals that Capa fabricated personal exploits, jiggered the timeline, misidentified individuals, proposed lame excuses, and conjured an improbable darkroom accident to explain the paucity of his images of the landing. He used this mumbo-jumbo to shuffle the deck and deal its cards to his editors, publishers, fellow reporters, lovers, friends, and even his brother. His inner circle kept the game going for decades by inviting successive generations of biographers, documentarians, agents, collectors, art dealers, corporate bureaucrats, archivists, estate attorneys, and museum trustees to bet on a legend and defend the myth. Two generations later, his misleading story has reverberated across innumerable captions, wall texts, exhibition catalogs, reviews, testimonials, lectures, and documentary movies, creating a huge gap between Capa’s claims and the event itself.
Why all the mystery?
After testing various theories to explain Capa’s actions, the excuses proffered by John Morris, Life Magazine’s editor in wartime London, and a fake video strip published on the Time website, Coleman’s Alternate History reaches the astounding conclusion that the photographer’s original ruse was part of a greater deception, called Plan Fortitude, created by SHAEF to confuse the German military command about the precise timing and location of the invasion. Described as “the most ambitious deception in the history of warfare,” Plan Fortitude was a massive, sustained deployment of human- and signal intelligence in the form of double agents, actors, dummy armies, fake radio messages, and aluminum radar decoys. It was an elaborate production staged throughout the whole European theater of war, enacted to freeze German defensive positions as thinly as possible along the French coastline and lure the enemy into thinking that the June 6th landing at Normandy was a deliberate feint, whereas the main allied invasion would occur later in the summer and nearly 300 kilometers to the north at Pas-de-Calais.2
Coleman and Charles Herrick, a military historian and Alternate History contributor, assume that all Capa’s D-Day films were subject to editing by the SHAEF censors in London as part of Plan Fortitude. Notably, they point to grease marks on Capa’s existing contact sheets to demonstrate the censorship of background images of the invasion fleet looming offshore. From this evidence, they deduce that the ten surviving images were selected according to three criteria – to conceal information about the size of the invasion forces, to show embattled American forces struggling to gain a foothold on Omaha Beach, and to convey to the enemy the illusion of weak invaders and strong defenders. Pushing this logic further, Coleman and Herrick hypothesize that the rest of Capa’s images were neither lost nor ruined but contained instead more logistical information than the censors wished to circulate in the mass media. Perhaps as many as 75 or 100 images were therefore suppressed or destroyed, prompting Capa, in turn, to invent excuses to cover the work of the military censors and rationalize his own lack of production. If this was the case, why did Capa and others maintain these deceptions after the war?
“Robert Capa” as a Hot Commodity
Beyond the evidence of fabrication and cover-up exhumed by Coleman and his contributors (J. Ross Baughman, Rob McElroy, Charles Herrick), we cannot presume to understand the nature of Capa’s attachment to these deceptions. Certainly, he could have justified the censorship after the war or even sought to retrieve the missing photos instead of perpetuating the fictional darkroom mishap. But his silence engulfed others who became guardians of his photographic legacy following his untimely death in May 1954. We need to question the tenacity of this myth, particularly given its association with the disinformation campaign of Plan Fortitude. Did its character as a military secret prolong this deception far beyond its expiration date? Or was it simply an opportunistic rumor whose mystery resides in the ambiguous connotations and scarcity of Capa’s D-Day photos?
If we take as the starting point Capa’s own narrative in Slightly Out of Focus, his autobiography published as a deliberate teaser for a Hollywood movie, the affair looks at first sight like an effort of self-promotion that exposes traces of narcissism, fueled no doubt by his friends and lovers. Although nothing materialized until well after his death, there have been several film projects based on Capa’s exploits, including one whose rights were optioned in the 1980s by the actor Richard Gere. In 2015, Magnum, the agency he cofounded, signed an agreement with a British television producer for a series based on his experiences.3 As a testament to the widespread interest in Capa’s celebrity, however, the deal soon collapsed under the weight of preexisting contracts whose international rights needed to be secured before the show could proceed.
Other photojournalists have imitated him with screenplays based on their own careers. Yet, none have succeeded because Capa’s case is exceptional in assembling a posse and binding them to a common goal for many decades. Coleman views this persistence as the result of professional alliances that coalesced around Capa and outlived him, a cabal of photo industry mavens who hitched their wagons to the myth. If Capa was enamored with celebrity, others, beginning with his brother Cornell and John Morris, devoted their careers to enshrining his legacy as a monument to personal courage and journalistic integrity. Cornell founded the International Center for [Concerned] Photography to advance this project and recruited Richard Whelan to write “Bob’s” official biography. Eventually, Cynthia Young became the principal keeper of the flame and the chief curator of the Capa Archives at ICP. For sixty years, Magnum’s role in this project was minimal; it served as the intermediary between the Capa Archives and the worldwide media by circulating press prints and referring collectors back to Cornell. To be sure, the agency benefitted commercially from Capa’s renown and sought new members among photojournalists likely to continue his work in the field. Yet Cornell kept his brother’s negatives locked in a safe and scrutinized print requests from Magnum’s sales force and external representatives.
A much tighter collaboration between Magnum and the ICP/Capa Archives developed following Whelan’s suicide in 2007 and Cornell’s death in 2008. By then, Robert Capa was a highly marketable brand and a top-of-the-line product. Magnum featured Capa prominently on its website while ICP mounted new exhibitions of Capa’s work, including one based on the rediscovery of lost images from the Spanish Civil War and another featuring his color photography. The Capa revival (2010–2014) spearheaded new publications, a film documentary, and a blizzard of reviews. Time joined in with special collector’s issues commemorating the 70th and eventually 75th anniversaries of D-Day.
It is prestigious to be known as Capa’s editor, agent, dealer, or gallerist dedicated to his legacy. Joining Capa’s “consortium,” as Coleman calls it, were professionals eager to become associated with the brand yet ignorant of the wider issues. In one case, computer-generated images (CGI) were used to misleadingly simulate the 35-mm film allegedly ruined by the darkroom scapegoat. Coleman’s discovery of this digital fraud in the early course of the inquiry forced Time to remove it from its website and Magnum to disown the production. Both actions were tacit admissions of complicity, yet public apologies never appeared.
Instead, Capa loyalists retaliated by accusing Coleman of behaving like a prosecutor in ambushing the nonagenarian, John Morris. The controversy spread to Paris, where two publications, Télérama and Le Monde, reacted emotionally to the French translation of Coleman’s inquiry. Télérama dismissed his probe without any independent reporting and characterized Alternate History as “oozing with hate.” Le Monde scrambled the facts into an omelet of grossly misinterpreted technical details to discredit Coleman and his expert collaborators. As the original source of the fake video, Magnum was trapped by the revelations; incapable of defending it, its members opted for silence except for the outspoken Patrick Zachmann, who publicly derided Coleman’s research at the Athens Photo Festival in Vienna on June 5, 2015.
Magnum’s reluctance to further jeopardize its journalistic integrity or invite negative publicity that could affect its reputation is understandable. For the most part, Magnum can fly under the radar because it is not important enough to merit the scrutiny of magazine conglomerates who, in the era of social media, are accustomed to regular fallout over unreliable reporting. In years past one might have imagined one of the agency’s major clients exerting pressure to acknowledge the digital fakery. In this case, however, Time’s weekly print edition sidestepped the controversy and contained its repercussions. Amidst the daily cascade of Trumpian lies and prevarications, what purpose would it serve to debate the ethics of an old war story? Who benefits from a squabble inside old media?
Possibly everyone, if dinosaurs like Time Inc. were to reflect critically on their role in producing the conditions for their dwindling audience. The internet is one factor, among many others, in the inability of the last century’s periodicals to maintain readership. The commitment to certain baseline principles of journalism began to fade at least a decade before the digital revolution as publishers surrendered their autonomy to the logic of corporate mergers and shareholder activism by ratifying the ascendancy of “bean-counters” as the Time director of photography Arnold Drapkin ruefully characterized the new class of executives atop the masthead in 1987.4 While the revelations in Alternative History are not as scandalous as some other controversies, they testify nonetheless to a sense of inertia or even cowardice permeating the institutional media. In exposing these tendencies, Coleman challenges Magnum, Time, and ICP to set the historical record straight. Yet they refuse.
The Value of Capa
Coleman sees profit as the motive underlying “the Capa Consortium’s” willingness to safeguard the brand at all costs, but this assertion remains difficult to prove without a historical accounting. It demands more evidence than Coleman has compiled and also begs analysis of the value a photographer can command when he enters into a “pool” as the price for access to an important event. In this case, it was an agreement between Time Inc. and the U.S. military to embed Capa with the Allied invasion forces. Once “pool” photographs are released, they become freely accessible and, therefore, worthless to the individual photographer or his agents in the short term. They are distributed by wire, special courier, or mail to government and media outlets comprising the pool. Although the photographer expects his credit to appear in print, the pictures can be published almost limitlessly and do not necessarily reflect the captions he furnishes along with the film. He surrenders control over the image’s value and also its connotations. In such cases, the greater value lies in the photos that do not enter the pool and, therefore, retain his full copyright and control, the very raison d’être for an agency like Magnum to resell his pictures. However, Capa produced only ten images, of which the three most important went into the SHAEF pool, thus diminishing the immediate commercial potential of his entire D-Day take. Life made millions selling its June 19, 1944 issue that featured the D-Day pictures under the title “Beachheads of Normandy” and compensated Capa for his work. Yet he was neither a Life staff photographer nor entitled to further royalties from Time Inc.
The pool photographer, their publisher, or agent retains the original negatives or slides and copyrights. His images have resale value according to several criteria: the uniqueness of the event, market saturation by subscribers to the pool, and the chronological distance from the actual event. Sometimes a competing non-pool photographer can grab the same shot, adding his pictures to the market thus diluting the aggregate resale value.
For example, during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, Magnum’s Stuart Franklin made the same shots as the Reuters wire service photographer of the standoff between a Chinese army tank and a young man holding his briefcase. Franklin was on assignment for Time, who had exclusive first publication rights. When called upon several weeks later to return his original color slide to Magnum, the magazine couldn’t find it and eventually declared it lost. My claims against this loss and subsequent negotiations with Time Inc.’s corporate counsel focused on determining the image’s net value for fair compensation. Referencing Capa’s D-Day photos, I researched total U.S. sales over a forty-year period and determined that Magnum had never asked for nor received a premium for those pictures. They were undoubtedly printed from copy negatives and licensed according to our library's standard usage rates of other historical pictures. Arriving at a rough figure of $50,000, I doubled it to estimate worldwide sales and asked for $100,000 compensation. Time Inc.’s attorney argued that Magnum had made enough duplicates of the slide to fulfill market demand. I countered that the color slide duplicates were worthless for high-quality reproduction on magazine covers, picture books, and exhibition prints. (This was before the perfection of digital enhancement technology.) Then, he raised the issue of the wire service photos and other stills extracted from video coverage of the same event. The existence of these images, he insisted, surely affected the long term value of Franklin’s missing slide. We agreed and finally settled on $50,000.5
Coleman offers no comparative figures, but assuming they were accessible, the global revenues for Capa’s D-Day images would be modest compared to the archival and print sales associated with collections by Magnum luminaries such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Steve McCurry, Elliott Erwitt, Eve Arnold, Dennis Stock, and Bruce Davidson. War photos are for textbooks, magazines, the occasional exhibition, and commemorative supplements every five or ten years. They command standard but measly rates in an industry lacking the means to police numerous bootlegs and digital copies that can be lifted from the internet. The noted French photojournalist Patrick Chauvel has made next to nothing after covering more than three hundred wars and conflicts over the past fifty years. Though still working, he complains of the industry’s total collapse. Excepting a small retirement pension from his agency and contributions from a wealthy Swiss patron who recently created a foundation for his photos, Chauvel states that his career would be over. “My son [also a war photographer] drives for Uber,” he added. “He goes nuts whenever he has to chauffeur his journalist friends to the airport.”6
If the Capa brand reflected true marketing genius rather than the passive, albeit prickly, defense of some poorly defined value, why not charge Steven Spielberg for using the D-Day photos in staging the opening scene of his movie, Saving Private Ryan. After all, Spielberg publicly acknowledged Capa’s work as integral to his re-creation of the scene on Omaha Beach. “Seeking the utmost accuracy in his portrayal of the D-Day landings, he strove toward absolute realism - he called it ‘combat photography.’” The verisimilitude of the film’s opening sequence derived precisely from Capa’s grainy images and their “surreal, peculiar bleached-out look that became synonymous with the brutality and devastation of that day in history.”7
Spielberg’s weighty homage certainly burnished the myth in the sense of an artistic compliment, yet this side-steps the issue of a fair price for borrowing Capa’s style. How much was that worth to Magnum or ICP? Can one stake a legitimate copyright claim over depicting a historical event? Certainly, one cannot trademark grosso modo the Normandy invasion, yet these questions are pregnant with implications for Alternate History.
To consider royalties, we must first ask whether the authentic visualization of combat is necessarily “grainy and bleached-out”? Neither Stanley Kubrick nor Oliver Stone thought so when graphically representing the Vietnam War in “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon,” respectively. Southeast Asia is a much different environment than the foggy English Channel, although the rain forests and rice paddies generate plenty of steam and mist, too. By contrast, the U.S. Coast Guard, Army, and Navy cameramen whose coverage of D-Day appears in Alternate History used equipment similar to Capa’s, yet their images and movies were clear and precise. Each style reflects external conditions, the apparatus, the subject, and the photographer’s mindsets, and although the list could be expanded, it seems adequate to make a case that Spielberg’s SPFX was plagiarized from Robert Capa’s signature D-Day coverage. Were litigation enjoined, Spielberg could deploy a battalion of attorneys whose frontline defense would no doubt fall upon the fair use of a press pool image from World War II. Obvious rip-offs are often blatant but rarely worth pursuing in court, especially for still photographers, who, despite their aliquot share of fame, don’t stand a chance litigating in the mosh pits of the entertainment industry.
Capa’s Archive
Coleman’s work is exceptional. Alternate History demonstrates the potential for a vastly expanded field of solid photography criticism. However, this requires unrestricted archival access, and the ICP has been exceedingly slow to make the complete Capa D-Day archives available, thereby creating further suspicion and inviting questions about the full cache of materials it retains. If access is the key to accountability, ICP appears to be floundering in its mission as a non-profit dedicated to “concerned” photography by withholding its most important papers from serious researchers. Its secrecy reflects a dangerous trend in mismanaging historical archives. One cannot underestimate the determination of privatizers to enclose the information commons.
The most striking example of this process whereby public memory has been sequestered in vaults, licenses, and technology occurred in 2001 when Bill Gates’ Corbis Corporation purchased and entombed the Otto Bettman Archive in Iron Mountain, PA.8 In effect, Corbis privatized ten million images of the world’s visual history by purchasing photographs from the legally defined public domain and then digitizing them in order to extend copyrights that expired long ago. The Bettman Archive was thereby converted into a private collection to be leveraged for its licensing value. This was essentially the imposition of false scarcity upon historical information to valorize it as a patented commodity. The archive’s management is not accountable to any “public" other than corporate shareholders. Access is minimal. Buried deep within an old mine, the photographs and illustrations are curated by librarians who may have little or no capacity for historical reasoning. They are merely retrieved, digitized, and licensed according to law of supply and demand, in other words, broken up for kindling and fed into the boiler room of commodification.
Fifteen years later, Gates finally understood the negligible value of images compared to software and subsequently abandoned photography to other businessmen. His sale of Corbis to Visual China Group compromised access to the archives even more severely. Simultaneously, Visual China acquired licensing rights to Corbis’ main rival, Getty Images, creating a worldwide monopoly of over 200 million historical photos. Immediately confined to the memory hole, noted one reporter, was the aforementioned 1989 picture of “tank man” during the Tiananmen Square uprising.9
The ICP archives will most likely be subsumed by a larger non-profit institution comparable to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin. Was it not an embarrassment when Michael Dell chose Ransom over ICP to deposit his Magnum press print collection? Why would he invest more money to upgrade ICP’s facilities when a major research university beckoned? As for Magnum’s interests in the brand, it’s impossible to tie commissions or earnings for working photographers to Capa’s reputation. The business doesn’t really function that way. Individuals establish their own professional credentials and learn to command what the market will bear. Also, the notion of a photographer’s success depending on the mystique of a long-deceased colleague devalues the labor of printers, agents, reps, and archivists whose input contributes mightily to the value of every image circulating in the business. Within its narrowly defined scope, Alternate History cannot identify the profits that “the Capa Consortium” allegedly protects.
Cui bono?
To fortify Coleman’s critique and make it relevant to the realities of big media and billionaire collectors, let’s recapitulate Coleman’s explicitly inductive method. The photojournalist J. Ross Baughman doubted the veracity of the widespread Capa D-Day narrative, a darkroom mishap that ruined all but ten of his shots from the Omaha Beach landing, prompting Coleman to unearth a surfeit of facts that falsified Capa’s story. “The project,” Coleman writes, “addresses the conscious, deliberate, eventually systematic creation of a financially and professionally profitable myth, seeded in their professional capacities by Morris and Capa and elaborated for seven decades by a consortium of powerful institutions and individuals.” In exploring its different versions and their authors, he literally diagrams their positions in a myth-sustaining enterprise that he identifies as “the Capa Consortium.”
But Coleman’s rudimentary graphic is too static and never attains its full potential. From beginning to end, he sticks with the same diagram without enhancing it to integrate information discovered along the way. He eschews a genuine sense of historical depth and thus sidesteps the broad implications of his own inquiry. By studying corporate hierarchy at Time Inc. circa 1944, for example, he would have undoubtedly gathered more grist for the mill. Why dwell on John Morris when one can trace the whole chain of command to Time Inc.’s head, Henry Luce? Given the historical importance of the story and the vast sales potential for Life Magazine, someone in New York was paying attention to Capa’s D-Day work and heard the perplexing tale of a darkroom accident. Who allowed the story to slide without demanding a full accounting from Morris? No competent editor would ever drop the subject; the first rule of journalism is that responsibility begins and ends in the newsroom. If Luce had suspected that Capa’s pictures had been withheld by military censors, his silence would have been understandable. Did other executives in the organization question Morris’ improbable story or alternatively nourish the myth? Similarly, Coleman forgets to include ICP’s trustees, individuals interested in defending the museum’s reputation and that of its collection.
D-Day as Fetish, D-Day as Ideology
The nexus of D-Day with Robert Capa’s images that were disseminated initially as pool photos by SHAEF, republished in Life, frequently reprinted worldwide, and thereafter consecrated as iconic representations, cemented a permanent bond between the historical event and its chronicler. Lapses in the photographer’s integrity, sins of omission and cover-up in this case, and the ongoing complicity of his associates (and beneficiaries) carry the potential to devalue the photograph and public memory of the historical event to which it is attached. In reciting the gospel of a mechanical failure, the members of “the Capa Consortium,” past and present, displace the ethical responsibility from Capa to a scapegoat (from the photojournalist to a novice darkroom assistant). Their compact resembles an irrevocable trust whose legacy is an almost sacred bond between Robert Capa and D-Day; as fiduciaries, their obligation is to sustain a legend from which neither Capa nor the historical representation of the singular event can escape. Not even Capa’s confession of momentary cowardice on the beach can interfere with their determination to frame his behavior in heroic terms. They are wedded to the historical significance of the events at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, as witnessed by Capa, whose authority has grown commensurately with the myth of American military invincibility from D-Day onward.
What raises the D-Day images to the status of sacred documents whose integrity must be defended at all costs? Commercially speaking, the photos are commodities, objects whose intrinsic value matters less than the prices they can fetch on the market. The Capa trademark distinguishes these ten D-Day pictures in two ways: they are a subset of all other pictures of the event, and they also belong to the lifetime body of work shot by Robert Capa, the famous war photographer. In objective linguistic terms, the pictures signify a historical event (the signified) that has an added value when signed by or otherwise authenticated as the exclusive work of Robert Capa. Other competent photographers recorded the event, and their images are still circulated on the market. For example, a recent history of D-Day by Antony Beevor features several photos of the invasion, including a nicely composed view of the landing on the dust cover.10 The only photo credits in the book are attributed to agencies while the individual photographers remain anonymous, suggesting that either the publisher at Penguin Random House had a relatively small budget for artwork, or perhaps the editor did not want Capa’s pictures upstaging his author. It would be too complicated to peek behind the scenes to determine whether the agencies pay royalties to the anonymous photographers’ estates. Yet, one can safely assume that Magnum, the Capa estate’s agent, would have quoted a premium price given Antony Beevor’s reputation and the print run for his book’s first edition. The difference in the commercial value of the pictures depends, for the most part, on the photographer’s “signature” or absence thereof. Other photographers witnessed the event, but Capa’s materials are worth more.
Why? There must be a reason because, as Coleman discovers, several people have lied for seventy years to defend their value or, what amounts to the same, the valor of this particular photographer. Behind the myth lay facts that Coleman sets out to examine in great detail, from Capa’s equipment, film, and handwritten captions to the approximate time and precise location of his arrival on the beach, the troopship that conveyed him across the Channel, the landing craft that shuttled him onto the beach, and finally the timing of his return to Weymouth where he disembarked and got a courier to rush his exposures to London.
Coleman deconstructs relentlessly. On almost every account, he finds discrepancies and traces them to John Morris, whose enigmatic responses do more to obfuscate than clarify the issues. He has mastered the blog format – unwieldy as it is for the reviewer – and converts it into an online platonic dialogue, parrying back and forth with Morris and his acolytes, inviting expert testimony, checking for errors, and excavating new sources. His digressions are carefully deployed to test the fragile bond between the photograph and its myriad interpretations, between the signifier (Capa) and signified (D-Day). With this line of empirical criticism, he echoes Baudrillard, for instance, in the controversy over the identity of the “face in the surf,” where one GI’s assertion (it is I) relies on an unsubstantiated claim about Capa’s whereabouts on the beach (he saw me, I saw him). The soldier’s testimony is not a direct recollection but rather a reference to his image as reproduced through the prism of hindsight and amplified by publicity surrounding the photograph. This double mediation bounces the truth from one subject to another, from the participant’s memory of a real event to a photographer and his publishers whose collective authority is presumed beyond dispute. Coleman dissects this argument and exposes its contradictions as symptomatic of rigor mortis in the body of contemporary journalism.11
Frustrated by Morris’ prevarications, Coleman again reviews the sequence of events based on the information at hand. He invites further research from military historian Charles Herrick to clarify the intelligence protocols for incoming pictures of D-Day. He rectifies the timelines by factoring in the intervals necessary for editing and censorship. He redirects the inquiry toward an objective understanding of the routes taken by the film on its way to Life in London. This breakthrough makes it possible to reinterpret Capa’s own statements. Although minimized by others, his panic attack on the beach was an honest confession that spoke volumes about his moment of overcoming fear of death in a single-minded devotion to his magazine deadline. The commodity triumphs over human emotion and dictates a man’s psychic order through a hierarchy of impulses unnaturally dominated by the quest for value. This is the core of Capa’s fame; the legitimacy of his pictures rested on overcoming his own instincts, body, and soul while facing the void.
Some profession. Not that of a warrior, but rather a photographer who gets to wear headlines on his chest. How so? By witnessing a human slaughter and suppressing its debilitating trauma in order to meet the deadline. In the Marxist formulation of Georg Lukács, this is reification, the control things exert over people. It constitutes the essence of bourgeois consciousness and permeates the very definition of professionalism:
This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their “owner” and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter at hand. The journalist’s “lack of convictions,” the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.12
Coleman’s inquiry points to the fragility of the photographic sign when subjected to persistent criticism. His systematic quest to test the strength of the bond (uniting the signifier and signified) casts him as a provocateur intent on destabilizing the market, undermining trust, and threatening the legitimacy of the faithful clerks to confer value and establish prices. His conclusions and historical analysis are looked upon as the demonic work of a blasphemer whose goal seems to be to scale the altar and insult the believers. His criticism, in other words, transgresses established boundaries, goes on too long, digs too deep, and, if left unchecked, will eventually tarnish the brand – Capa, Magnum, ICP, Time Inc. The dealers, auctioneers, collectors and other affiliates of “the Capa Consortium” form a society dedicated to perpetuating the supernatural power of the object-sign to confer wealth and status upon its owner. In this sense, the D-Day photos are sacred icons worthy of supplication, and they will yield abundance if circulated judiciously according to the rules of art and commerce. Fetishes by any other name, they are to be exhibited according to an inviolable liturgy. Otherwise, they are wastepaper.
The appropriate liturgy involves a recitation that differs from written and oral history because photos are real chemical traces of past events. They are objects used by the living (or those present) to access preceding generations (or distant places). In a gallery, their three-dimensional positions command our physical gaze; displayed in magazines and books, on desktops and tablets, or shuffled as fiber prints, they are haptic, affording us the opportunity literally to touch the past. But which past?
We forget that photographs are also the products of social hierarchy, embodying relations of dominance and subordination that likewise result from the struggles of capital versus labor, humans versus technology, and so forth, ultimately reduced to chemical and thermodynamic exchanges deep within nature. Like John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, photographs absorb dust of the people, places, and events they record, yet more often than not, their meaning gets abstracted from its historical context and dissolved in a giant vat of visual content. Even through the sense of touch, it is impossible to behold them transparently, innocently, or without preconceptions. When associated with the recitation of epic sagas, World War II, for instance, they are considered consubstantial with the dominant narratives (of the victors), and, as such, nothing comes closer to the material incarnation of pure ideology.
Coleman’s inquiry points toward the only trustworthy memory of events in Capa’s confession of panic and terror on the beach, echoed in the oral history of soldiers drenched in urine and vomit, running amok, toppling one by one into the rising tide, paralyzed by fear, and cut to shreds by German machine gun fire.13 The contrast with the celebratory heroics usually associated with these pictures could not be starker. Indeed, if there were more photos of Capa’s D-Day work, perhaps the SHAEF censors found them too gruesome for publication. Yet these icons exist as monuments to the doctrine of a “just war” against Nazism. When paired with the iconic photo of the Marine flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, they become potent symbols of the US military’s faded glory. They are the twin anchors for a public culture of militarized nationalism; they display a ritual inviting Americans to ratify war and consent to imperialism while simultaneously believing themselves to be an exceptional, democratic nation.
Ironically, Henry Luce, Capa’s boss and godfather of the consortium writ large, coddled the Nazis when Time described the 1936 Nuremberg rallies as “the greatest show and heartiest picnic on earth” and wrote admiringly of Hitler’s “magnetism.” Two years later, Luce’s flagship magazine “greeted Hitler’s mobilization of a million soldiers with sunny indifference” and hailed Germany’s annexation of the Czech Sudetenland as a victory for diplomacy and an extraordinary precedent for world peace. Luce’s rabid anti-communism viewed Nazism as “an antidote against Bolshevism,” while Life Magazine’s grim reports of the Spanish civil war … made no judgments about justice.”14 The same Spanish Civil War that gave rise to Capa’s fame yet took the life of his young fiancée, Gerda Taro. The same totalitarian confab that murdered Jews in Capa’s Hungarian homeland. The same Time Inc. paying rent to John D. Rockefeller Jr., who cajoled and flattered Mussolini to lease the offices next door “because Nazi representatives had said they wouldn’t rent space in Rockefeller Center until a deal was consummated with the Italians.”15 The Rockefellers, whose Standard Oil fueled the Panzer divisions that blitzed across Europe and occupied France. Without simplifying or minimizing this chain of causality, is it unreasonable to suggest that Capa’s pictures cannot be easily dissociated from a tradition of revision, cover-up, and disinfection?
Alternate History as Restorative Practice
Not long after the defeat of Germany and Japan, the United States waged a half-century-long “cold war” against communism that included brutal military campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. No less violent and pointless were more abbreviated incursions in Grenada, Somalia, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Iraq (again), Syria, and Niger. Wherever U.S. boots hit the ground or waded ashore, Capa’s D-Day photos were instrumental in portraying the “world police” on a mission to restore order and democracy. Capa’s ten miraculous frames spoke unequivocally of righteousness and just war. Indeed, his official spokesperson, John Morris, defended their legacy and its dubious narrative into his 100th year. He gathered a chorus of professionals to perpetuate the myth of American exceptionalism in the manner of Archimedes’ famous dictum, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world.”
A long, defiant untruth bolstered the maximum propaganda value of Capa’s photos until Coleman embarked on his forensic research project that continues to guide interested readers to new facts and fresh conjectures. By way of example, there is now evidence that all Capa’s exposed films went first to London’s Advanced Intelligence Section of General Headquarters, a clandestine group known as “the Martians,” who notably failed to anticipate the heavy German artillery defenses at Omaha Beach resulting in “disaster, with the highest casualty rate of any sector.”16 As evidence of this mistake, were the missing films confiscated as part of a cover-up? Do they still exist somewhere?
What can Alternate History teach us about contemporary photojournalism? Should we interrogate other iconic photos, put them under Coleman’s microscope, and question their historical verisimilitude?
Alternate History performs an essential service in delineating between the corporate media class and photographers, between those who curate history and those who record it firsthand. During the wet photography era, photojournalism operated according to a specific division of labor; characterized by the phrase shoot-and-ship, photographers sent their unprocessed films and captions to agents and publishers who developed and edited them for the market. The digital revolution of the 1990s altered this production chain by facilitating the transmission of photos directly from the field. This new technology led publishers to offload responsibility for editing onto the photographer while the corporate media class trimmed editorial jobs to increase profits. Despite taking on this additional work, photographers earned less, yet inadvertently, they acquired a potential for greater control over their own pictures. But not every photographer knows how to exercise this option; it requires a deeper consideration of the work and its potential impact.
Coleman's method is restoration. He scrapes decades of accumulated lore from the images to demystify the photographer and reveal the event in all its gruesome immediacy. He does what critics do best: He enhances the image by subtracting the historical distortions peripheral to the sign. How different is this process from the work of skilled artisans working with scholarly art historians to painstakingly remove centuries of grime from Renaissance masterpieces to reveal new figurative details, patterns, colors, and even palimpsests of earlier sketches?
Defenders of the Capa myth don’t appreciate contested history. They market a brand whose past due date has long since expired to an audience intoxicated by spectacle and mesmerized by celebrity. Their persistence betrays an exasperation with complexity and nuance. They demand black and white in a world infused with color. Alternate History, by contrast, invites us to a systematic reconsideration of photojournalism’s past and, in so doing, points the way forward.
Robert Dannin has a doctorate in linguistics and anthropology from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris 1981). He taught at Brown University and New York University and is co-founder and director of the Ddora Foundation. Among his scholarly publications, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford University Press 2002) was the first ethnography of Islamic religious conversion in America. In 2009, he was an inaugural fellow at the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony. His most recent works include the historical novel Trigger (2021) and Benevolent Warrior, A Critical Study of Jacob Schiff, Robber-Baron and Philanthropist (forthcoming).
His career in photojournalism began at Sipa Press and Sygma. In 1985, he became editorial director of Magnum, where he produced Sebastião Salgado Jr.’s Workers (Aperture 1993). His other editorial credits include James Nachtwey’s Inferno (Phaidon 2000) and Arms Against Fury: Magnum Photographers in Afghanistan (Powerhouse 2002). He served on the board of the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund and recently assisted in the production of the Global Investigative Journalism Network’s Reporter’s Guide to Investigating War Crimes.
Authors note: The title is inspired by (and with apologies to) Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” Blonde on Blonde (Columbia Records, 1966).
See a selection taken from the 2004 book Magnum Stories, published by Phaidon, on the Magnum website (accessed on 22 May 2024).
Antony Beevor, D-Day, The Battle for Normandy, (New York: Penguin, 2014), chapter 1.
Tara Conlan, “Ronan Bennett to write TV drama on Magnum photo agency,” The Guardian, 8 June 2015 (accessed on 22 May 2024).
Personal communication, Drapkin to the author.
This was ten times more than our counselor, Howard Squadron, believed reasonable and indicative of the disconnect between the business imperatives of his principal client, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. International, and Magnum. The incident summarizes the variables at play in estimating the lifetime value of a news photo.
Interview, “Il faut savoir ne pas sortir une photo,” Le Monde, 2 Septembre 2019, 21.
Ian Nathan, “Classic Feature: The Making Of Saving Private Ryan,” Empire Magazine, 112, October 1998 (accessed on 22 May 2024); Judith Gillies, “Behind the Memorable Images,” Washington Post, 25 May 2003 (accessed on 22 May 2024).
Sara Boxer, “A Century’s Photo History Destined for Life in a Mine,” New York Times, 15 April 2001 (accessed on 22 May 2024).
Mike McPhate, “With Corbis Sale, Tiananmen Protest Images Go to Chinese Media Company,” New York Times, 27 January 2016 (accessed on 22 May 2024).
Beevor, D-Day, The Battle for Normandy.
Similar confusion surrounds the identity of at least one of the soldiers depicted in Joe Rosenberg’s photo flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. See André Wheeler, “US marine in classic Iwo Jima photo was wrongly identified, historians find,” The Guardian, 16 October 2019 (accessed on 22 May 2024).
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 100.
Beevor, D-Day, The Battle for Normandy, chapter 7.
Alan Brinkley, The Publisher, (New York: Knopf, 2010), chapter 9.
Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York, (New York: Verso, 1993), chapter 7.
Thomas Nagel, “Leader of the Martians,” London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 17, 7 September 2023 (accessed on 22 May 2024).
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