War photographs often take on a Life beyond the recorded picture. For the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach, Life magazine photographer Robert Capa’s eleven blurry images became iconic in the D-Day narrative. Back Into Focus is author Charles Herrick’s attempt to close the gap between the reality and myth captured in these photos. He questions their veracity and contends that Capa and Life chronically misrepresented key tactical details of the event. Herrick does not hide his indignation, suggesting that Capa’s overall behavior borders on stolen valor.
Herrick begins by highlighting Capa’s dubious photojournalism during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He describes how Capa passed off a staged photo of a Republican soldier at the moment he was purportedly shot on the battlefield. Herrick sees this incident as a formative experience in young Capa’s career and suggests that he continued to favor powerful image-making over truth-telling during his assignments with American forces in the European Theater during World War II.
In the run-up to D-Day, Herrick compares Capa’s admittedly semifictional recollections from his autobiography, Slightly Out of Focus, to other contemporary accounts, convincingly rebutting many of Capa’s claims about where he was on North African and Italian battlefields. He is especially critical of Capa’s habit of attaching himself to airborne drops that were implausible at best and most likely total fabrication. He feels strongly enough to revisit this part of Capa’s resume after finishing his D-Day analysis. Herrick provides ample evidence that Capa was rarely as close to the front as he claimed and did not jump until the closing days of the war. He does not begrudge Capa’s reluctance to jump but rather his attempt to pass himself off as a willing participant.
Herrick then shifts to Capa’s D-Day assignment and the pressure under which his editor John Morris was working. He meticulously pieces together Capa’s whereabouts during the complex D-Day timeline from Britain to Normandy and back. With courtroom precision, he compares Capa’s and Morris’s inconsistent accounts with Army and Navy records, manifests, photographs, and still-frame excerpts from official motion pictures. After presenting the evidence, he concludes that Capa landed at a different part of Omaha Beach than claimed, in a later assault wave than claimed, and for a shorter duration than claimed. Upon returning to Britain, Herrick questions Morris’s explanation that a darkroom mishap ruined all but eleven of Capa’s 106 images from the landing, suggesting instead that government censors most likely retained the rest of the images.
In this section, Herrick mentions Morris’s D-Day predicament. Of his six D-Day photographers on assignment for Life, only Capa produced publishable photos of the landing. Given this fact, it is understandable that Morris and Life’s copy editors would sensationalize the images and imagemaker in their 19 June edition.
This exhaustive reconstruction is enough to put Back Into Focus in the library of any World War II museum or photo archive curator. The narrative advanced by Capa, Morris, and Life endures to this day, even when presented with the inconsistencies uncovered by Herrick and his predecessors. Perhaps it is the “lionization” of Capa that most perturbs Herrick and leads him to broader criticism about Capa’s postwar career and photographic merit.
Back Into Focus shifts from Capa’s D-Day exploits to a review of his exaggerated airborne resume and description of his questionable work ethic while on assignment for Life. He concludes that Capa’s work lacks technical merit but provides no examples from Capa’s portfolio to support this claim. Herrick saves his harshest antipathy for the conclusion, speculating that the Capa legend perhaps met a better end when he was killed by a landmine in French Indochina while in his ’40s rather than being “pitied at 85 as a fossilized corporate executive who decades before had once been a photographer in a war that ended before most of the public had been born” (p. 303).
Back Into Focus is a detailed reference for historians specializing in World War II public affairs activities of D-Day. It is also illuminating for museum curators and war photography curators who may be unwittingly propagating the exaggerations debunked by Herrick and his predecessors.
In the broader context, Army public affairs and press outlets had a target audience, and Capa delivered images that satisfied his employer and the audience. Ironically, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom in 1947 for his wartime accomplishments. If the Army or Life Magazine disapproved of his behavior, they nonetheless endorsed his narrative and self-promotion. Ultimately, the reader must decide the relative significance of these ethical lapses.