IMAGINE the scene when unique films exposed under heavy enemy fire are rushed from the Normandy D-Day beach landings in France to London for rapid processing. The expectations surrounding the results are building nervously and senses are on edge among waiting Life magazine editorial staff.
Now try to imagine the crisis that followed when a teenage lab assistant discovers he has set a hot drying cabinet too high in haste, causing delicate emulsions to melt.
The result? Of four complete rolls covering 106 exposures, just 11 frames were usable. Apparently, Robert Capa never said a word to his bureau chief about the loss of his pictures and the 'The Magnificent Eleven' group (as they were termed) of surviving shots were given dominant space on pages of a following issue.
Capa had been among the second American assault wave on Omaha Beach, on 6 June 1944, holding in readiness two Contax II cameras with 50mm standard lenses and spare film. After two hours of front line action, he had taken more than 100 shots and was ready to pull out after the forces storming Omaha faced heavy enemy resistance.
Captions accompanying the The Magnificent Eleven described the pictures as 'slightly out of focus', claiming that Capa's hands were shaking, yet in a personal account he admitted 'his empty camera was trembling in my hands'. His autobiographical account published much later featured Slightly Out of Focus as his chosen title.
Observers have suggested that much of Capa's work in the war years, from the trenches and the more usual arm's length perspectives, redefined a role for action photography. Among his favourite sayings was: 'If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough.'
War action was not new to him. He had already covered, famously, the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, and had survived the experiences. In May 1954, he was working with two Time Life journalists covering the First Indochina war. While travelling with a French regiment through a known danger area, he left his Jeep and walked towards the advancing action. There was a telling explosion within minutes. Capa had stepped on a landmine, wounding him fatally by the time a field hospital had been reached.
Capa's photographic misfortunes were not confined to D-Day only. His vast Spanish Civil War picture collection was presumed lost for many decades after he fled Europe in 1939. The negatives appeared in the 1990s in Mexico City, where they had been dubbed the 'Mexican suitcase'. All items were transferred to the Capa Estate in 2007 and now rest in a Manhattan museum.
As this year marks the 70th anniversary of D-Day, there are questions to be asked about what the other 95 melted exposures might have have held to show the realism facing Allied forces on a day that helped to change the outcome of the war.
AP reader Dale Adams recalls how a darkroom disaster almost ruined historic D-Day landing pictures.
From an article in the Back Chat section of Amateur Photographer magazine of 7 June 2014.
