Showing posts with label Robert Capa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Capa. Show all posts

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Robert Capa Centennial Birthday (born Friedmann Endre Ernő; October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954)




Robert Capa, photographer, on a destroyer during the ship arrivals in French beach
for landings and liberation of France, June 6, 1944
 




Portrait of Robert Capa during the Allied liberation of Italy, Naples, 1943
Magnum photo by George Rodger


 (Contact Gallery for print details)


Robert Capa: Magnum

Get Closer: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”                    

New York Times Lens: Robert Capa: Finding a Fearless Photographer’s Voice

The Telegraph: Robert Capa: a giant of modern war photography

The Telegraph: Iconic War Photographs

International Center of Photography: Capa at 100

Robert Capa: International Center of Photography

Monday, July 15, 2013

"What do cameras and combat have in common? Neither seem to be going away"



Via NPR The Picture Show


What Do Cameras And Combat Have In Common?

"For me it's about the impact of war as it relates on a very basic human everyday life," says New York-based photographer Nina Berman, who has been photographing wounded veterans since 2003. Her image titled "Marine Wedding," made in 2006, captures a moment between Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel and his bride on their wedding day. Ziegel was seriously wounded by a suicide car bomber in Iraq and spent 19 months in recovery.

"In that moment I saw a shellshocked couple," says Berman. "That is what war does. It disturbs, distresses and changes the normal lovely course of life."

The image itself has had a life of its own, garnering Berman a World Press Photo Award and launching Ziegel into the national spotlight to discuss the failures of veteran care.
Years later, Berman sees the image as less about the couple and more of a symbol of the impact of war.

"I think that people can be taken aback by how [Ziegel] looks," she says, "but there are a lot of people that look like him. He wasn't a freak, an anomaly; that's what this war has done. People who would have died are surviving. That is the reality."

Berman's voice shuddered as she spoke about Ziegel's passing late last year. She says she often wonders: What does it all amount to?

If you strip war of its historical and political context, it seems, what you are left with is simply to wonder: Why has war been a constant throughout human history?

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

101 Images for Press Freedom






By Cristina Kladis


The fifth annual FotoWeek DC is upon us, and Reporters Without Borders is hosting one of its weightiest shows. “101 Images for Press Freedom” captures the history of photojournalism, beginning with the Spanish Civil War and culminating with the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Included in the exhibit are works by renowned photojournalists like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as iconic images associated with major events, like the Tienanmen Square protests. The show’s goal is to remind viewers just how much photojournalists sacrifice on the job. In conjunction with the exhibit, tonight the Corcoran Gallery of Art hosts “Transforming Society Through Photos: The Role of Free and Independent Photojournalism,” a discussion with with Magnum Photo Agency photographers Larry Towell and Peter van Agtmael and Washington Post Director of Photography MaryAnne Golon about photojournalism’s role in society. Don’t go expecting too many Instagram shots.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Corcoran Gallery of Art hosts “Transforming Society Through Photos: The Role of Free and Independent Photojournalism." Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2012.




The exhibition is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Nov. 10–Nov. 18 at the Warner Building, 1299 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. $5. fotoweekdc.org.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Exhibit to showcase photojournalists' historic works; Discussion about the past, present and future of photojournalism

 Mary Vecchio grieving over stain student, Kent State, May 4, 1970

Robert Nott | The Santa Fe New Mexican
Friday, August 05, 2011

Photojournalists are the invisible documentarians of history; men and women who understand that their images will outlive them. We may all remember the classic black-and-white photo of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on VJ Day, 1945, but do we recall who shot it? (Alfred Eisenstaedt). Likewise, the image of Jack Ruby shooting presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald may remain indelibly imprinted in our minds, but do we know the name of the photographer? (Robert Jackson).

Monroe Gallery of Photography pays homage to the historical contributions made by photojournalists with both a photo exhibition called History's Big Picture and a public discussion with magazine editors Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo.

Both men worked as editors for Time, Life and People magazines, and the two will talk about the past, present and future of photojournalism at 5 p.m. Friday at Monroe Gallery on Don Gaspar Street.

"These are real moments captured by real people," Wingo said during a joint interview with Stolley at the gallery. "These were all done before the advent of Photoshop [computer software that allows manipulation of images]. These days you can't necessarily trust a picture."

Following up on that point, Stolley pointed to John Filo's photo of Mary Vecchio grieving over a slain student in the wake of the Kent State shootings in 1970 — an image hanging in the Monroe Gallery exhibition — and noted that a fence post seems to be protruding from Vecchio's head.

"Photoshop could erase that and probably make that a better picture, aesthetically, but it's not the truth," he said.

A lot of the images in the Monroe show suggest that photojournalism displays its power via tragic, sometimes bloody images — Eddie Adams's photo of South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a suspected Viet Cong in the head at close range, for instance, or Bill Eppridge's image of an Ambassador Hotel busboy attempting to help slain presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.

But, as Stolley points out, "There are moments of love that are caught as well," as with Ed Clark's moving photo of an accordion player weeping as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral train passes by in Warm Springs, Ga.

Though these photojournalists were well trained and prepared to capture unexpected moments, luck and timing sometimes played a hand. Stolley tells the story of two photographers who were in the same place at the same time on the morning of Nov. 23, 1963.

That's when Dallas police were transferring President John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, through the police headquarters basement on his way to jail. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped out from the crowd and shot Ruby at close range just as photographer Robert Jackson took a photo. Jackson won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts, but photographer Jack Beers caught nearly the same image on his camera — about half a second earlier.

"Two pictures were taken by two photographers that morning," Stolley said. "The first one (Beers) is just off; taken less than a second before the other. Jackson's is the photo that became famous."

Stolley and Wingo remember a number of photojournalists who gave their lives on the job: Robert Capa, who stepped on a land mine while covering the First Indochina War; Paul Schutzer, who was killed covering the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and Life photographer Larry Burrows, who died in a helicopter crash in Laos in 1971.

"He used up two 'nine lives' before he died," Wingo said of his colleague Burrows.

Both men feel that photojournalism remains a vibrant art form. "Young people would rather look at a picture than read," Stolley said, pointing to the success of life.com, which offers more than 10 million photos on its site.

And photojournalism does not have to rely on the written word to tell its story.

"You didn't have to say or write anything," Wingo said. "The photo says everything you want to know. The fact that it captures a moment that is frozen in time stays with you."

If you go:

What: Time, Life and People editors Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo discuss History's Big Picture

When: 5-7 p.m. Friday

Where: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 992-0800.

Admission: Free

Seating is first-come, first-served. The photo exhibit runs through September 25.

Related: 'This is one of the most powerful photographic shows I have ever seen and, certainly, in my opinion, the best Santa Fe has ever had the privilege of hosting.'
Review: Iconic Consciousness

Friday, July 29, 2011

REVIEW: "ICONIC CONSCIOUSNESS"

Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan,2006
Eric Smith: Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006


By Maylin Wilson Powell
The Albuquerque Journal
July 29, 2011

In our current era of citizen journalism, when amateur submissions are used on Internet news sites, technology and media consolidation have rendered the work of professional photojournalists a much more contingent endeavor. There is, of course, great value in the kind of rousing images that were taken by young women with cellphones during the heat of Egypt’s uprising and transmitted instantaneously around the planet. But, what of the men and women who consistently invested in firsthand photographic reporting over a number of years? The number of photojournalism images published by news organizations has shrunk dramatically in the shift of emphasis to more entertainment and lifestyle coverage. Without courageous and seasoned photojournalists actually going and talking to and taking pictures of people during the eruptions of wars and revolutions, our understanding of the world becomes more and more distorted.

“History’s Big Picture” exhibition at the Monroe Gallery of Photography is a gripping selection of images that brings home the power of visual storytelling. Hung chronologically from the 1930s to the present, these 58 photo images by the masters of 20th and 21st century photojournalism are predominately sobering. The overall impression of history and the big picture presented here tells a collective story of “Woe is us.”

More than a third of the images are from what is known as the “Golden Age” of photojournalism, the 1930s to the 1950s, when magazines including LIFE, Look and Sports Illustrated (USA), Paris Match, and the Berliner Illustrierte Zetung along with newspapers The Daily Mirror (London) and The New York Daily News built huge reputations and circulations based on photography by such artists as Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White. The show opens with the work of these three celebrity photojournalists, including Eisenstaedt’s image of the self-satisfied architects of fascism, “The First Meeting of Mussolini and Hitler, Venice, June 1934,” along with an especially chilling image of the vampirish “Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Geneva, September, 1933,” the Reich’s minister of propaganda, himself a failed journalist and writer who organized the 1938 Kristallnacht for burning books and synagogues.

Capa’s “D-Day, Normandy, Omaha Beach, 1944″ is actually a great watery blur of a soldier swimming toward such massive implements for killing as fortified tank turrets and hundreds of thousands of land mines. Bourke-White is represented by two images –– the first captures three raggedy children in front of a raggedy sign that announces “Entering New Deal, Montana, 1936,” which was a mini-boomtown that faded away in the 1940s after the completion of a federally financed dam. Her second image is a riveting, crowded composition of “Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945″ each of them staring directly at us and still pressing forward across more than half a century from behind a metal fence on the day of their liberation. Scanning their figures and faces, it brings into question what the concepts of liberation and survival could mean to every one of these individuals and their descendants.

On view are five iconic images that were seen on the front pages of newspapers around the world the day after they were shot on location. In the case of Joe Rosenthal’s “Marines Raise the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945,” the U.S. government also printed 3.5 million posters for free distribution, and this image was certainly the template for Thomas E. Franklin’s raising of the flag by “Firefighters at Ground Zero, Sept 11, 2001.”

As the gallery notes, other justly famous images of the turbulent and troubled 1960s still “shake and disquiet us,” including Robert Jackson’s “Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, November 24, 1964,” Eddie Adams’ “Execution in Saigon, South Vietnam, February 1, 1968,” John Olson’s “U.S. Marines at battle of Hue, Vietnam, 1968,” and Bill Eppridge’s assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Mixed in with these images that are part of the collective consciousness of baby boomers and assembled to celebrate the gallery’s 10th year in Santa Fe (after 14 years in Manhattan) are many images that are no less powerful but that have never before been exhibited on gallery walls. All of the conventions of fine art composition and framing are deployed by these masters in the heat of the “decisive moment.” Cameras are angled upward to frame such famous men as Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. as towering presences. Ground level shots with strong diagonals that signal things gone seriously awry including Eppridge’s splayed, spot-lit pieta of Bobby Kennedy attended by a waiter on bended knee, Loomis Dean’s tilting blasted “Mannequins after nuclear test at Yucca Flats, Nevada, May 1955,” and John Filo’s “May Vecchio grieving over slain student, Kent State, May 1970.” Unflinching, upright, straight-ahead perspective confers dignity and gives the viewer a place of privilege in such heart-wrenching situations as Ed Clark’s image of a tear-stained African American accordionist “Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing” a dirge for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral cortege.






Sixties minimalism is used to great effect in Steve Schapiro’s austere and stripped-to-the-essential “White Women, Arkansas, 1961,” and in Eric Smith’s somber empty auditorium “Funeral for Iraqi War soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006.” Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s late-1970s empty “Theatres” lit only by a streaming movie projector, Smith’s flag-draped, centrally illuminated casket with no one in attendance is an eerie metaphor, in this case, of offshore deaths that are intended to be kept out of sight and out of mind. In 2003, the Bush administration summarily banned all coverage of the bodies of U.S. troops returning from Iraq, a ban that was lifted in February 2009.


 Hadai Mizban: Iraq "War Games", Baghdad, Iraq, July 2, 2007 (c. AP)


That the gallery is almost always crowded with people talking about these images is due to a multitude of factors. The core reason is the consummate talent, quick response and fortitude of photojournalists working in often terrifying situations where their cameras make them prime targets. Are all those young viewers, who never had the opportunity to see them in print, a testimony to their thirst for truth, rather than entertainment? Certainly, it also has to do with the central location and welcoming open door of Monroe Gallery, a valuable addition to Santa Fe and a recognized international and persistent player in recovering and encouraging the best photojournalism.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the gallery is sponsoring an evening of conversation, next Friday, August 5, from 5 to 7 p.m., between two American photojournalists turned editors, Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo.

If you go WHAT: “History’s Big Picture”
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don GasparÂ
WHEN: Through Sept. 25.
HOURS: Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
CONTACT: 505.992-0800 or info@monroegallery.com


Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (Time Inc.)
Carl Mydans:  Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (c.Time Inc.)



Read more: ABQJournal Online » Photos Capture History http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2011/07/29/north/photos-capture-history.html#ixzz1TUabZmqX
Subscribe Now Albuquerque Journal

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Reviews: "A great collector discerns quality before anyone else notices it"


Monroe, Brando Ooze Hollywood Glamour in London Exhibition: Martin Gayford

Via Bloomberg


A great collector discerns quality before anyone else notices it.


John Kobal (1940-1991) was in Los Angeles in the 1960s at a time when the Hollywood studios were clearing out their libraries of still photographs. Kobal often was invited to take his pick, according to his friend the critic John Russell Taylor. At other times, he was tipped off when the images were being dumped so he would follow and fill his car.

Some of those gleanings can be seen in “Glamour of the Gods: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation” at the National Portrait Gallery (through Oct. 23) in London. Here are glittering divas and handsome movie heroes from Gloria Swanson to Marilyn Monroe. By Monroe’s era, Kobal’s enthusiasm was running out. He was a star-struck romantic, and in his view the “gods” and “titans” of Hollywood belonged to the ‘20s and the ‘30s.


 "Elizabeth Taylor"
 "Elizabeth Taylor" (1948) by Clarence Sinclair Bull. The photograph is on display in "Glamour of the Gods" at the National Portrait Gallery in London until Oct 24. Source: National Portrait Gallery via Bloomberg


Those publicity shots he rescued are partly performance art. Joan Crawford told Kobal, “I photographed better than I looked so it was easy for me… I let myself go before the camera.” The result, in an MGM still from 1933 by Clarence Sinclair Bull, was a blend of regal beauty and emotional intimacy.

Crawford and the others were doing what they did best, acting to camera. The studio photographers were deploying, often brilliantly, all the arts of traditional portraiture: lighting, composition, costume and flattery. The latter took the form of extensive retouching.

Worry Lines

There’s a telling comparison between shots of Crawford by George Hurrell in 1930, before and after this treatment. Au naturel, she has worry lines and freckles -- still beautiful, yet vulnerably human. No goddess. This brings out a truth: The histories of painting and photography have always been closely intertwined (all the more so today thanks to Photoshop). These photographs are altered by hand-painting; conversely, of course, painters often use photography as a tool.




 "Dancing Lady"
Clark Gable and Joan Crawford "Dancing Lady" (1933) by George Hurrell. The photograph is on display in "Glamour of the Gods" at the National Portrait Gallery in London until Oct 24. Source: National Portrait Gallery via Bloomberg



“Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century,” an outstanding exhibition at the Royal Academy (until Oct. 2), demonstrates the same point in a different way. Robert Capa, one of the major photographers included, once remarked, “It’s not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.” That was a backhanded way of emphasizing how many masters of the camera emerged from Hungary betweeen 1920 and 1940.



  "Satiric Dancer"
"Satiric Dancer" (1926) by Andre Kertesz. The photograph is on show in "Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century" at the Royal Academy in London until Oct. 2. Source: Royal Academy via Bloomberg


Just why that Central European nation was so photographically fertile is hard to say. What the major figures -- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Brassai, Martin Munkacsi and Andre Kertesz -- had in common was modernism. They use the same tight geometrical structure and pared-down forms as a painter such as Mondrian, whose studio apartment was the subject of a marvelous photograph by Kertesz.

Line and Energy

Moholy-Nagy actually was an abstract artist as well as a photographer. Munkacsi’s “Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika” (1930) has the fluent line and bounding energy of a Matisse, found in the real world and recorded in a split second (this image inspired Cartier-Bresson’s whole career). A few years later, Munkacsi went to the U.S. and began the modern tradition of fashion photography, an artificial art if ever there was one.



"Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika"


Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika" by Martin Munkacsi. The photograph is on show in "Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century" at the Royal Academy in London until Oct. 2. Source: Royal Academy via Bloomberg


If the actual scene didn’t quite have the correct arrangement of lines and surfaces, these photographers might adjust it. Kertesz moved Mondrian’s vase to create the right curve, while Capa may have staged his celebrated and endlessly controversial “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman” (1936).

That possibility only bothers those who confuse photography and truth. Like the still of Crawford sans freckles, Capa’s image of a falling Spanish Republican isn’t raw reality. It’s art.

“Glamour of the Gods: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation” is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through Oct. 23. Information: http://www.npg.org.uk.

“Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century” is at the Royal Academy until Oct. 2, see http://www.royalacademy.org.uk. For more on the foundation: http://www.johnkobal.org/.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Martin Gayford in London at martin.gayford@googlemail.com or http://twitter.com/#!/martingayford.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.

Monday, June 6, 2011

D-DAY: JUNE 6, 1944



 AT THE HEDGEHOGS (36 K)
 Men of the 16th Infantry Regiment seek shelter from German machine-gun fire in shallow waterbehind "Czech hedgehog" beach obstacles, Easy Red sector, Omaha Beach.
© Robert Capa/Magnum Photos.

 
The Magnificent Eleven: The D-Day Photographs of Robert Capa

Via Skylighters.org

When soldiers of the 16th Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division landed at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, photographer Robert Capa, in the employ of LIFE magazine, was among them.

Perhaps the best known of all World War II combat photographers, the Hungarian-born Capa had made a name for himself well before climbing into a landing craft with men of Company E in the early morning hours of D-Day. He risked his life on more than one occasion during the Spanish Civil War and had taken what is considered the most eerily fascinating of all war photographs. The famous image reportedly depicts the death of Spanish Loyalist militiaman Frederico Borrell Garcia as he is struck in the chest by a Nationalist bullet on a barren Iberian hillside.

Capa was known to say, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough." On D-Day, he came close once again. With Capa standing in the very stern, his landing craft mistakenly came ashore at the section of Omaha Beach dubbed "Easy Red." Then the ramp went down.

"The flat bottom of our barge hit the earth of France," Capa remembered in his book Slightly Out of Focus. "The boatswain lowered the steel-covered barge front, and there, between the grotesque designs of steel obstacles sticking out of the water, was a thin line of land covered with smoke — our Europe, the 'Easy Red' beach.

"My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return. The men from my barge waded in the water. Waist-deep, with rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking beach in the background gangplank to take my first real picture of the invasion. The boatswain, who was in an understandable hurry to get the hell out of there, mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation, and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear. The water was cold, and the beach still more than a hundred yards away. The bullets tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the nearest steel obstacle. A soldier got there at the same time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover. He took the waterproofing off his rifle and began to shoot without much aiming at the smoke-hidden beach. The sound of his rifle gave him enough courage to move forward, and he left the obstacle to me. It was a foot larger now, and I felt safe enough to take pictures of the other guys hiding just like I was."

Capa was squeezing off photographs as he headed for a disabled American tank. He remembered feeling "a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face." With great difficulty his trembling hands reloaded his camera. All the while he repeated a sentence that he had picked up during the Spanish Civil War: "Es una cosa muy seria" ("This is a very serious business").

After what seemed an eternity, Capa turned away from the beach killing zone and spotted an incoming LCI (landing craft, infantry). He headed for it. "I did not think and I didn't decide it," he later wrote. "I just stood up and ran toward the boat. I knew that I was running away. I tried to turn but couldn't face the beach and told myself, 'I am just going to dry my hands on that boat.'"

With his cameras held high to keep them from getting waterlogged, Capa was pulled aboard the LCI and was soon out of harm's way. He had used three rolls of film and exposed 106 frames. After reaching England, he sped by train to London and delivered his precious film for developing.

A darkroom technician was almost as anxious to see the invasion images as Capa himself. In his haste, the technician dried the film too quickly. The excess heat melted the emulsion on all but 10 of the frames. Those that remained were blurred, surreal shots, which succinctly conveyed the chaos and confusion of the day.

Capa's D-Day photos have become classics. One of them, depicting a GI struggling through the churning surf of Omaha Beach, has survived as the definitive image of the Normandy invasion. He went on to photograph the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. He also photographed his friends Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, as well as film star Ingrid Bergman, with whom he reportedly had a love affair.




After that, having cheated death so many times, Capa vowed never to risk his life in wartime photography again. In 1954, however, he agreed to supply LIFE with some photos of the escalating conflict between the French and the Viet Minh in Indochina. That spring, while attempting to get as close to the fighting as possible, he stepped on a land mine and was killed at the age of 40.



LIFE COVER (21 K)
Capa's shot of a victorious Yank graced the May 14, 1945 cover of LIFE.


Robert Capa is one of many wartime photographers who have risked their lives and made the ultimate sacrifice to capture the essence of desperate combat on film. Frozen in time and etched in our collective memory, the D-Day photos speak volumes about courage and sacrifice.

John G. Morris, 1998

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I had rehearsed my part in every detail, from the moment the raw film arrived in London to the transfer of prints and negatives to the courier who would take them to the States — with a stop at the censor's office in between."

– John G. Morris
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Dennis came bounding up the stairs and into my office, sobbing. 'They're ruined! Ruined! Capa's films are all ruined!'"

– John G. Morris

The Editor: John Morris

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Something woke me early on the morning of Tuesday, June 6, 1944. I drew the blackout curtain and saw that it was just another dull, gray day, colder than an English spring had any right to be. The streets were empty, and I was alone in the flat I shared with Frank Scherschel on Upper Wimpole Street in London's West End. He had departed — vanished, actually, without saying a word — several days earlier for his battle station, a camouflaged airfield from which he would fly reconnaissance over the English Channel to photograph the largest armada ever assembled. My job was to stay behind, to edit those and other photos for LIFE as picture editor of the London bureau.

I dressed as usual in olive drab, turned on the radio, made tea and read the papers, which of course had nothing to report. Then, at 8:32 London time, the bulletin came over the BBC:

"Under command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong Allied air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France."

"This is it," I whispered to myself, uttering the very words that Joe Liebling of The New Yorker later called "the great cliché of the Second World War." I hurried to the TIME-LIFE office in Soho, even though there wouldn't be much for me to do — for many hours, as it turned out.

I had been waiting eight months for this day. There had been a false alarm on Saturday, when a young telegrapher in the Associated Press London bureau, practicing to get up her speed, had put out an erroneous bulletin:

URGENT PRESS ASSOCIATED NYK FLASH EISENHOWER'S HQ ANNOUNCED ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE

It had been corrected within a minute — "Bust that flash" — but it had sent a wave of panic through both Allied and German headquarters. Now it was for real. Tuesday was a good D-Day for LIFE. Our job was to furnish action pictures for the next issue, dated June 19, which would close on Saturday in New York, and appear the following week. Wirephotos, of poor quality and limited selection, would not do; besides, they would be available to newspapers through the pool. Our only hope to meet the deadline was to send original prints and negatives, as many as possible, in a pouch that would leave Grosvenor Square by motorcycle courier at precisely 9:00 a.m. London time on Thursday. The courier would take it to a twin-engine plane standing by at an airdrome near London. At Prestwick, Scotland, the base for transatlantic flights, the pouch would be transferred to a larger plane. After one or two fuel stops, it would arrive in Washington, D.C., and our pictures would be hand-carried to New York on Saturday.

I had rehearsed my part in every detail, from the moment the raw film arrived in London to the transfer of prints and negatives to the courier who would take them to the States — with a stop at the censor's office in between. Clearing the censors at the Ministry of Information was by now a familiar routine. Their office was on the ground floor of the University of London's tall central building, which backed onto Bedford Square. Available twenty-four hours a day, the censors were cooperative, as censors go, permitting us to sit alongside them as they worked. Our photographers knew to avoid the faces of Allied dead, shoulder patches that revealed unit designations, and "secret" weapons (although by now most were known to the enemy) — so the work was for the most part pro forma. But it was tedious in the extreme, since every single print had to be stamped, after which the censor bundled all the acceptable material into an envelope and sealed it, using a special tape imprinted with the words PASSED FOR PUBLICATION. Without the tape, it could not leave the country.

Getting the packet by car to the courier at Grosvenor Square, about a mile from the ministry, looked simple on the map, but the most direct way, down Oxford Street, was often jammed with double-decker buses, so I devised a parallel route on a series of side streets: Hollen to Noel to Great Marlborough to Hanover to Brook (I can remember every turn five decades later). This put me onto the wrong side of Grosvenor Square, but the final fifty yards could be covered on foot — while running at top speed. I left the little two-door Austin sedan Time Inc. had given me to its own fate. It was not uncommon for joyriders to take it out for a spin when I worked late, but that was no problem. A call to Scotland Yard was all that was necessary. The car would invariably be found as soon as the thief ran out of what little petrol was in the tank.

For the Normandy invasion, there were twelve photographers accredited for the wire services and six for LIFE. (In the photo at left, taken one week before disembarkation in Normandy, are (top) from left to right: Bob Landry, George Rodger, Frank Scherschel, and Bob Capa. Bottom, John Morris (Editor) stands between Ralph Morse and David Scherman.) Only four press photographers were supposed to land with the first wave of American infantry on D-Day itself, and we managed to get two of the spots, for Bob Landry and Robert Capa. Both were veterans — Capa would be on the fifth front of his third major war. Although often unlucky at cards and horses, Capa nevertheless used a gambling metaphor to describe his situation on D-Day in his 1947 memoir-novel, Slightly Out of Focus: "The war correspondent has his stake — his life — in his own 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 in with Company E in the first wave."

Bob Landry also felt obliged to accept this dubious privilege. The other LIFE assignments sorted themselves out. Frank Scherschel stuck with his buddies in the Air Force. David Scherman chose the Navy. George Rodger accompanied the British forces, under General Bernard Montgomery. Ralph Morse's assignment was General George Patton's Third Army, but since it would not hit the beachhead until later, he boarded a landing ship whose job it was to pick up casualties — of which there would be plenty.

Who would get the first picture? Bad weather prevented good general views from either air (Scherschel) or sea (Scherman). Rodger, landing with the British on an undefended beach, "walked ashore in a blaze of anti-climax," as he put it in typically modest understatement. All day Tuesday we waited, and no pictures. It was rumored that one Signal Corps photographer had been killed in the first hours, but it turned out that he had "only" lost a leg. Late on Tuesday night Bert Brandt of Acme Newspictures, having scarcely gotten his feet wet, returned to London with a first picture!, but not a terribly exciting one, of a momentarily unopposed landing on the French coast, shot from the bow of his landing craft. Landry's film — and his shoes — somehow got lost. A disaster. I had been told that AP would have the fourth first-wave spot, but not one of their six photographers landed that day. So it was entirely up to Capa to capture the action, and where was he? Hour after hour went by. We were now waiting in the gloom of Wednesday, June 7, keeping busy by packaging the "background pictures," all of relatively little interest, that now flooded in from official sources. The darkroom staff — all five of them — had been standing by idly since Tuesday morning, their anxiety about the pressure they would be under growing steadily by the hour. This nervousness would soon result in an epic blunder.

At about 6:30 Wednesday evening, the call came in from a Channel port: Capa's film was on the way. "You should get it in an hour or two," a voice crackled over the line before fading into static. I shared this information with pool editor E. K. Butler of AP, a feisty little martinet whose nickname was "Colonel." He snapped back, "All I want is pictures, not promises!" Around nine, a panting messenger arrived with Capa's little package: four rolls of 35-millimeter film plus half a dozen rolls of 120 film (2 1/4 by 2 1/4 inches) that he had taken in England and on the Channel crossing. A scrawled note said that the action was all in the 35-millimeter, that things had been very rough, that he had come back to England unintentionally with wounded being evacuated, and that he was on his way back to Normandy.

Braddy, our lab chief, gave the film to young Dennis Banks to develop. Photographer Hans Wild looked at it wet and called up to me to say that the 35-millimeter, though grainy, looked "fabulous!" I replied, "We need contacts - rush, rush, rush!" Again I phoned Butler through the AP switchboard, but he could only bellow, "When do I get pictures?" Brandt's wirephoto of troops landing apparently unopposed had scarcely satisfied the West's desperate need to believe in the actuality of invasion. A few minutes later Dennis came bounding up the stairs and into my office, sobbing. "They're ruined! Ruined! Capa's films are all ruined!" Incredulous, I rushed down to the darkroom with him, where he explained that he had hung the films, as usual, in the wooden locker that served as a drying cabinet, heated by a coil on the floor. Because of my order to rush, he had closed the doors. Without ventilation the emulsion had melted.

I held up the four rolls, one at a time. Three were hopeless; nothing to see. But on the fourth roll there were eleven frames with distinct images. They were probably representative of the entire 35-millimeter take, but their grainy imperfection — perhaps enhanced by the lab accident — contributed to making them among the most dramatic battlefield photos ever taken. The sequence began as Capa waded through the surf with the infantry, past antitank obstacles that soon became tombstones as men fell left and right. This was it, all right. D-Day would forever be known by these pictures.

One more ordeal lay ahead. We now had only a few hours to get our picture packet through the censors, and in addition to Capa's we had hundreds of other photos, the best from Dave Scherman of matters just before the landing. The British and Canadians had covered invasion preparations for days, as had the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the Navy and Air Force photographers. Nobody really cared now about such pictures, but we dutifully sent them on.

At 3:30 on Thursday morning, pictures in hand — including Capa's precious eleven — I drove my Austin through deserted streets to the Ministry of Information, where I had to wait my turn. Ours was the largest picture shipment of the week, and I almost wished I could throw all but the Capa shots overboard in the interest of time. Finally, about 8:30, the censor finished putting his stamp on all the pictures. I stuffed the big envelope, and then it happened. The censor's specially imprinted tape stuck fast to its roll. It simply would not peel off. We tried another roll. Same result. This went on for minutes that seemed hours, and I had to deliver the packet to the courier, a mile away, by nine o'clock — our only chance to make the deadline after eight months!

I left the ministry at about 8:45 and drove like a maniac through the scattered morning traffic, down the little side streets, reaching the edge of Grosvenor Square at 8:59. I ran the last fifty yards and found the courier, in the basement of the Service of Supply headquarters, about to padlock his sack. "Hold it!" I shouted, and he did.

Just after LIFE's Saturday-night close, the editors cabled,

TODAY WAS ONE OF THE GREAT PICTURE DAYS IN LIFE'S OFFICE, WHEN CAPA'S BEACHLANDING AND OTHER SHOTS ARRIVED.

I could only think of the pictures lost. How was I going to face Capa?



PHOTOS 1-5 (14 K)

The D-Day landing print will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition: "History's Big Picture" at Monroe Gallery of Photograpjhy July 1 - September 26, 2011.


Related: The Photographic Collection of John G. Morris

The National World War II Museum

Friday, June 3, 2011

EXHIBITION REVIEW: COMPOSING THE ARTIST

Truman Capote, Holcomb, Kansas, April,1967
Steve Schapiro: Truman Capote, Holcomb, Kansas, April,1967

THE Magazine
Santa Fe's Monthly Magazine
June 1, 2011

In the words of the great storyteller Eudora Welty, “a good snapshot stops a moment from runningaway.” Capturing someone on film is a tricky business, particularly when that someone is a famous author or artist. The skill and agility of the photographer is elegantly evidenced in Composing the Artist, an exhibition currently on display at Monroe Gallery. This diverse survey offers an intimate glimpse into some of thepast century’s most iconic art personalities.


Abstract artists who emerged in the middle of the twentieth century introduced not only new ways of making art, but in fact encouraged us to look at the very concept and convention of art with fresh eyes. In Helen Frankenthaler, New York (1969) Frankenthaler is in a deep downward bend, pouring a bucket of paint onto a canvas spread out across the floor. She wears an expression of almost otherworldly serenity on her face—an aspect that stands in sharp contrast to the revolutionary physicality of her actions. This photograph of the incongruously graceful Frankenthaler is placed near an image of Jackson Pollock, who is crouched down in characteristic paint-flinging insouciance with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Deeply personal portraits like these underscore the intimate and sometimes sensual act involved in the process of a painting’s creation and make us momentarily privy to the very human activity of artistic expression.

Even a cursory familiarity with the creative luminaries of the past century is helpful in appreciating this show. For example, a 1967 shot of Truman Capote—dapperly dressed and jauntily posing outside the Holcomb, Kansas post office—seems playful at first glance; knowing that sleepy Holcomb is the town made infamous by Capote in his crime novel In Cold Blood adds depth and interest to this otherwise lighthearted composition. Fans of Matisse will swoon over Robert Capa’s 1950 portrait of the celebrated abstractionist. The stout eighty-one-year-old painter is holding up a thin, long brush that’s roughly the length of his body and gently applying paint to a large sheet of paper taped to the wall. The image’s caption informs us that Matisse is making sketches for the murals of the Chapelle des Dominicains, in Paris. To hold a brush of this length would be an awkward feat for even the most able-bodied young man. It’s clear, however, that Matisse’s advanced age doesn’t hinder him from his creative endeavors in the slightest. The artist’s calm agility creates a composition of remarkable impact.

Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot pictures the couple walking along a beach. A beaming Picasso is holding a parasol above Gilot, his longtime muse and lover, and one recognizes in their carefree smiles the sort of sun-soaked giddiness that comes with spending a romantic day at the beach. The frayed rim of the straw hat worn by the radiantly beautiful Gilot is offset by the fringed tassels on the parasol carried by Picasso, adding further visual intrigue to the happy scene.

A riveting 1958 portrait of Vladimir Nabokov taken by Carl Mydans captures the author leaning out of a car window, looking over his shoulder with his hair mussed and his eyeglasses halfway down his nose. His eyes twinkle with mischief, and his quiet smile is both disinterested and amused. The subject’s disheveled appearance contrasts mysteriously with his cunning countenance, making the simple act of looking at a photograph a strangely private experience. A portrait of Ernest Hemingway on a hunting trip with his son in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1941, is absolutely stunning. The ten- or eleven-year-old boy is lounging nonchalantly against a bridge, his clean bare feet flexed, and it’s clear that this comfortable pair is taking a break from the day’s activities. The calm, casually postured Hemingway adds a quality of mellow serenity to a scene that is at once unplanned and composed. This quiet look at a moment of relaxation between father and son stops just short of being sentimental, and contains that rare quality that makes photography such a singularly personal and moving art form.

The exhibition standouts are plenty, and Monroe Gallery does a fine job of including a wide range of complex, fascinating characters. Perhaps that clichéd concept of “the good old days” is a largely exaggerated one, but these photographs nevertheless leave one feeling an almost intoxicating nostalgia for a bygone era marked by creative vigor and intellectual ingenuity.

—Iris McLister

The exhibition continues through June 26, 2011

MONROE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

112 Don Gaspar
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.992.0800

http://www.monroegallery.com/

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Editor and Writer David Schonauer on the Risky History of the War Photographer

David Schonauer
David Schonauer
Former editor-in-chief, American Photo magazine


Via The Huffington Post
Hetherington, Hondros, and the Risky History of the War Photographer



To the list of photographers who have died while covering war and conflict, we must now add the names of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, killed in Misurata, Libya on Wednesday. They join the likes of Ken Oosterbroek, a member of the so-called Bang Bang Club of photojournalists immortalized now in a new movie. Oosterbroek was killed in 1994 while covering the violence in South Africa during the final days of apartheid. They join Olivier Rebbot, killed in El Salvador in 1981 while on assignment for Newsweek. Rebbot was a model for the photographer played by Nick Nolte in the 1983 film Under Fire. They join Robert Capa, killed near Thai Binh, Vietnam in 1954, who was the model for all who would follow in his profession. If the war photographer has come to be seen as a romantic figure, we have the Hemingwayesque Capa to thank.


It was Capa, famed for covering the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, who said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough," and the photographers who followed him into Vietnam took his advice. Vietnam was a particular deadly place for photographers, who jumped aboard helicopters alongside soldiers to fly into firefights. The names of the dead -- Larry Burrows, Gilles Caron, Henri Huet, Robert Ellison, Dickie Chapelle, Charles Eggleston, and Oliver Noonan among them -- have become legend. The haunting 1997 book Requiem memorialized these journalists -- 135 photographers from different nations known to have died in Vietnam. In the book's introduction, David Halberstam described why their job was so dangerous:

"War correspondents always know who is real and who is not. A war zone is not a good setting for the inauthentic of spirit and heart. We who were print people and who dealt only in words and not in images always knew that the photographers were the brave ones, and in that war... they held a special place in our esteem. We deferred to them, reporter to photographer, in that venue as we did in few others."

They were real because they had to be real; they could not, as we print people could, arrive a little late for the action, be briefed, and then, through the skilled use of interviews and journalism, re-create a scene with stunning accuracy, writing a marvelous you-are-there story that reeked of intimacy even though, in truth, we had missed it all. We could miss the fighting and still do our jobs. They could not. There was only one way for them to achieve intimacy: by being eyewitnesses.

I knew Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, but not especially well -- in the case of Chris, we went out for beers on a couple of occasions and spoke on the telephone a few times when he wrote a story for the photography magazine I edited. (He was a fine writer, too; urgent, clear, and caring.) My acquaintance with Tim was very brief -- I interviewed him last November, over coffee at a hotel lobby in New York, about his book Infidel, which had just come out. In similar ways, Chris and Tim impressed me, immediately and lastingly, as superior people -- humble, humorous, dedicated, and very intelligent. Real, as Halberstam put it.

Halberstam noted that the Vietnam War began "in an era of black-and-white photography and ended in one of color videotape beamed by satellite to television stations all over the world." The world of photography has changed just as radically in the past ten years. On 9/11, when photographers raced to downtown Manhattan to document the devastating scenes there, most carried film cameras. At the time, the first professional-quality 35mm SLRs were just coming onto the market. News organizations and photo agencies anticipated America's reaction to the terrorist attacks and retooled, almost overnight. When American troops went to war in Afghanistan a few weeks later, photojournalists covered the story with digital cameras and satellite uplinks, ramping up the speed with which they could deliver pictures. Later in the decade, as the Internet took hold and the old-media world imploded, photographers began doubling as videographers and writers. (Underscoring the evolution, last year the Associated Press dropped its time-honored byline, "Associated Press Writer," with the more ambiguous "Associated Press.")

Tim Hetherington thrived in this new journalistic landscape. A skilled filmmaker as well as a photographer, he could tell a story through a number of media platforms. In his Oscar-nominated film Restrepo, and in his small but powerful photo book Infidel, he told the story of a U.S. combat unit in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, never veering far from the everyday reality of the soldiers' lives. "Symbols or representations of soldiers are often claimed by the far left and far right to mean a certain thing," he told me, "and we do these men an injustice by not digesting fully their reality."



2011-04-22-INF_FINAL_CMYK_HR_0096.jpg
An image from Hetherington's book Infidel



It's a dangerous job they do, and like others who do dangerous jobs they learn how to cope as best they can. A correspondent friend of mine who traveled with Chris Hondros on several stories in Iraq later told me that the photographer had taught him a valuable lesson about working in a combat area: to sleep when sleep was possible, in the lulls between action and danger. Chris, a recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal, a prestigious award for the highest level of war photography, knew what he was doing and why. And he no doubt understood the implications of another of Capa's famous comments: speaking of his work on D-Day, Capa said, "The war correspondent has his stake, his life, in his own 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 in with Company E in the first wave."


Please take a moment to write a message to Tim Hetherington's family and share it with his friends