Regular readers of this blog will notice that I have temporarily unpublished all the other blog posts. That is because I used them as a basis for a book on this topic that is being considered by a publisher right now. I hope to announce that it has been accepted for publication, but more on that later. . .
This post is a spoiler alert for the book. I’m going to spill the beans as succinctly as I can. The book will have many new discoveries and insights regarding Robert Capa’s D-Day pictures, but two very important things have emerged. One, that I briefly discussed in the blog entries, is that Capa arrived on Omaha Beach at 7:50 am and left at 8:50 am. Others have claimed he was there for a much shorter period, but I have lots of new data that support a one hour stay on the beach.
This means he had to have made it from the water to the shingle, which increases the likelihood that he did expose a second roll of film—the famous missing roll. I was so confident of this that I decided to submit this draft of my book based largely on this revelation alone, and included a few ideas regarding the possible fate(s) of the missing roll.
Then, after I sent the final draft of the manuscript to friends and colleagues to read, I learned a few things that led me down a path proving that the darkroom mishap, as told by Robert Capa and John Morris, very possibly is true.
To briefly recap. Capa and Morris claimed that most of his film from D-Day was ruined when a novice laboratory assistant at LIFE offices in London melted the emulsion off of the film by placing it in a heated, unventilated drying cabinet. Modern critics have tested film in heated drying cabinets with temperatures reaching over 300-degrees F with no evidence of emulsion melt. In fact, the acetate backing melts before the emulsion does at high temperatures, so critics conclude that Capa and Morris lied about this incident and threw the hapless laboratory assistant under the bus to preserve Capa’s reputation as the world’s greatest war photographer.
My first revelation was information I obtained from Robert Shanebrook. Mr. Shanebrook was Worldwide Product-Line Manager for Eastman Kodak Professional Films for thirty-five years and author of the definitive book, Making KODAK Film.
I asked Robert about the possibility of an emulsion melting in a hot drying cabinet. He told me this would not happen with modern films because the emulsion contained hardeners to stabilize the emulsion and prevent melting. His understanding of those early films was that they did not have much in the way of hardeners, although he did not know their formulas.
That was interesting, but did not help me to understand what may have happened to Capa’s film. Then I learned that fellow LIFE photographer George Rodger had trouble with his emulsion melting when he developed film in Baghdad, where the ambient temperature reached 130-degrees and he could not cool his water below 100-degrees. In his book, Desert Journey, Rodger said he added chrome alum to his solutions as a hardener to prevent the emulsion from melting off while in the warm solutions.
Hmm. . .
Then I learned that a certain historian of photographic processes, whose identity I will disclose in a future post, recently had manufactured some 35-millimeter film using an emulsion formula from 1925. It did not include hardeners. Now, granted, this formula was probably not the same as the Eastman Kodak Super-XX that Capa used, but it is the closest that could possibly be had. This gentleman kindly provided two rolls to me for experimentation.
I did several things with this film, but to cut to the most important part, I exposed the film and developed it in D-76, which was a common developer at that time. While wet, I hung one strip in a shower at 71-degrees F and placed the other strip in an oven set at 120-degrees. The first strip dried normally. The emulsion on the second strip began to melt after about two minutes. The entire strip did not begin melting all at once but it went from normal to melting very quickly. Here are the two strips, with the bottom strip from the oven.
Voilà! Kind of looks like grey mud, doesn’t it?
I have multiple primary sources that show Capa was on Omaha Beach for one hour. During that time he would have been killed either by German guns or the rapidly rising tide had he remained in the water. He had to go to the shingle where he had plenty of time to expose at least one more roll of film. He ultimately delivered his film to LIFE in London where an inexperienced darkroom assistant took it upon himself to dry the wet film under hotter than usual temperatures under orders from John Morris to “rush, rush, rush!” because of a tight deadline. The lad probably saw the emulsion start to melt and grabbed the strips quickly, saving a few frames that had not reached the critical temperature yet.
In this scenario no one lied. Not Capa, not Morris, not the LIFE employees, not the Army censors and couriers, not everyone who has had custody of the film since 1944, and most of all not the veterans who said that Capa arrived with them at 7:50 am. I have several more experiments and much more interesting material that is far too lengthy to summarize in blog posts. All of this will be covered in my book, hopefully due out later this year. The tentative title is, Easy Red, A Critical Analysis of Robert Capa’s Iconic D-Day Images. But titles are subject to change by the publisher. I’ll keep you posted (sorry)! Thank you for your continued interest.
