Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day – A. D. Coleman in Conversation with Nadya Bair

Some of the most iconic pictures of the twentieth century were made on D-Day (June 6, 1944) by the photographer Robert Capa (1913–1954). The fame of Capa’s pictures is inseparable from the legend about them. In his 1947 memoir Slightly Out of Focus, Capa claimed that the film containing the pictures he shot on the beach melted while being processed by a Life magazine darkroom assistant in London. Capa claimed that only 11 frames survived. In 2014, photo critic and historian A.D. Coleman began investigating Capa’s pictures and the melted film story and published his findings on his blog as he went along. As photographers and military historians became involved, “Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day” expanded into a massive investigation that forced the rewriting of history. On the 80th anniversary of D-Day and 10-year anniversary of the “Alternate History” project, photo historian Nadya Bair sat down with A.D. Coleman to talk about what his investigation uncovered and the stakes of those findings. Their conversation opens onto larger questions about the process of historical research in the digital age and the nature of visual evidence, particularly how images are used by historians and how misinformation about news pictures can take hold for generations.