Indeed, from the agency’s inception in 1947 through today, every Magnum photographer has known that the doors of that drying cabinet in London were not “normally kept open” when it contained wet film, just as they’ve known that the emulsion on Capa’s 35mm Super-XX film did not get destroyed after “just a few minutes” in a closed drying cabinet with a small heating coil on its floor. It’s exactly the kind of implausible excuse that someone with no hands-on experience with the craft of photography and entirely ignorant of standard darkroom procedures - someone like, say, John Morris - would concoct in a moment of desperation to cover something up. No experienced photographer or darkroom worker would believe such a story, or make it up.
Cornell Capa knew it too he had done his own apprenticeship in Paris developing film for his brother, David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others, and had subsequently become a darkroom tech for LIFE in New York before turning photojournalist himself. But Robert Capa knew that his apprenticeship as a photographer in Berlin in the early ’30s had started with him doing darkroom work for Simon Guttmann’s picture agency, Dephot. The disclosure by this blog of the obvious fact that film emulsion doesn’t melt as a result of brief exposure to heat may have come as news to John Morris last year. (Click here for my discussion of the first half of that lie, and Magnum’s accountability for it.) The second half of the falsehood on which all members of Magnum, past and present, have signed off over the decades concerns the fable of the melting of the emulsion of Capa’s Omaha Beach negatives in LIFE‘s London darkroom on the night of June 7, 1944.
Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons.
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