ちょっとピンぼけ

オバマ大統領のチューインガムの方が話題になった気もしませんが、フランスのノルマンディーのオマハビーチに訪問して式典に参加しているところを見ると今でも連合国側のD-Dayの重要性を感じ取ることができます。

（オックスフォード）
D-Day
a date on which something important is expected to happen
From the name given to 6 June 1944, the day on which the British, US and other armies landed on the beaches of northern France in the Second World War.

ちょっとピンぼけ (文春文庫) (1979/05) ロバート・キャパ 商品詳細を見る

70周年に合わせてか、この表紙の写真があまりにも有名なロバートキャパの上陸作戦に参加し、撮った写真をロンドンの編集部にまで送り届けるまでの1日を描いた記事がVanity Fairに載っていました。報道写真展で思い出したのでご紹介します。

Robert Capa’s Longest Day
Seventy years ago, the great war photographer joined the first slaughterhouse wave of D-day, recording W.W. II’s pivotal battle in 11 historic images of blur and grit. But that is only a fraction compared with what he shot—and lost.
By Marie Brenner

‘I just kind of put my camera above my head . . . and clicked a picture . . . and when I came back, I was a very famous photographer.” The voice you hear in the archive of the International Center of Photography is a Carpathian mumble: the only known recording in existence of Robert Capa’s voice. Incredibly, it turned up for sale on eBay recently and was discovered there by a Capa curator at I.C.P. who had been searching for it for years. Here was Capa in October of 1947 on New York’s most popular radio show, Hi Jinx, with Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg. On the air, he was very clear about the moment he believed had changed his life. “That camera which I held above my head just caught a man at the moment he was shot. . . . That was probably the best picture I ever took.” Capa is referring to his most well-known—and perhaps most controversial—image, the dramatic photograph taken September 5, 1936, called The Falling Soldier. Who hasn’t seen the picture? The Loyalist volunteer, in his white shirt with sleeves rolled up, stands with his rifle and is gunned down, the impact causing him to collapse backward.

意外というか、Capa could not exist without the adrenaline of warというほどの戦争カメラマンでありましたが、He did not want to have anything to do with an image that exploited deathと本人は感じていたそうです。

In the 1970s a British journalist challenged the authenticity of the photo, saying it was staged, a claim that has been debated. Another theory suggests that in fact Gerda Taro—the woman responsible for his transformation from Endre Friedmann into Robert Capa, mysterious “American photographer”—took the shot, an assertion that Capa scholars strongly dispute. Taro would die in Spain in 1937, the first female correspondent to be killed in combat. Capa never recovered from her loss. “Capa detested the picture. He did not want to have anything to do with an image that exploited death,” Morris told me.

撮影するだけでは不十分で、フィルムをしっかりと現像室まで届けなくてはいけないというのは、今ではピンとこなくなってしまいましたね。

キャパの写真が載った当時のLife MagazineをGoogle Booksで読むことができます。



ベトナム戦争でなくなる直前に東京を訪れていたこともこの記事で知りましたが、先月朝日新聞はキャパの東京での写真について取り上げていたのですね。

Rare 1954 portrait of photojournalist Robert Capa found in Kamakura
May 03, 2014

A rare photograph of legendary war photographer Robert Capa (1913-1954), taken while he was covering a labor rally in Tokyo three weeks before his death in May 1954, has come to light for the first time.
Wearing a casual outfit and posing with a camera in his hands and a cigarette dangling from his lips, the portrait was taken by a Japanese cinematographer. Capa was in the country in April and May of 1954 to shoot the everyday lives of postwar Japanese. It is one of the few remaining pictures of the Magnum Photos founder while he was shooting subjects during his Japan tour.

Vanity Fairの記事は6月６日の様子がひしひしと伝わる良記事でしたので、興味ある方は是非是非読んでみてください。

Slightly Out of Focus (Modern Library War) (2001/06/12) Robert Capa 商品詳細を見る

ちょっとピンぼけの洋書を買ってみましたが、写真が多く、本文は少なめなので、こちらも洋書入門としてもオススメできそうです。