A photo legend, legendary photos
June 6, 2004 - The Star-Ledger
PARIS - His list of accomplishments reads like a history lesson on the last half-century.
Photo editor John Morris partied with Ernest Hemingway, directed Alfred Hitchcock, worked with John Steinbeck, helped one of the best-known photo agencies in the world get off the ground and quietly revolutionized the look of newspapers.
At the top of the list, however, would be his work 60 years ago as London picture editor for Life magazine where he helped transform 11 grainy Robert Capa photos of Normandy’s Omaha Beach into the defining images of D-Day.
“Their very crudeness gives a feeling of the struggle itself,” said American-born Morris, 87, during an interview in his apartment here.
He likens the significance of Capa’s pictures to photographer Joe Rosenthal’s famous 1945 photo of Marines raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima.
In America, “1942 and 1943 were years of preparation the (Capa) photos are symbols of the final offensive. We’d been waiting for this moment for so long. It was the beginning of the end of the war.” But the photos of that moment almost didn’t make it. When he is asked whether he knows something of the story about “destroyed photos,” Morris lets out a quick sigh and says, “That was me.”
All but 11 shots from four rolls of 35 mm film Capa sent back from the front were ruined. A rushed photo developer working under Morris at Life’s London bureau accidentally melted the emulsion off of the film in the too-hot darkroom. Morris takes the blame.
Getting the photos to the United States was no easy task. In a scene that will almost certainly figure into the Discovery Channel docudrama that will air tonight, Morris grabbed the pictures, got into his Austin and raced the photos to the censor’s bureau.
After an agonizing wait for clearance, he sped down side streets before abandoning his car and sprinted across Grosvenor Square to meet a courier who would have left with or without the photos exactly one minute later. The photos appeared in the June 19 issue of Life.
Morris himself arrived on Utah Beach on July 16 while the battle for Normandy was still on. He stayed for four weeks. “There’s nothing quite like it,” he said, noting the differences between seeing the photos from the front and being part of it. “Air raids (in London) are extremely impersonal,” but in Normandy, “you feel the war in your stomach.”
In his four weeks on the front, Morris was shot at several times and had a last-minute change of plan that kept him from being bombed in a friendly-fire disaster.
“I was glad to have the experience (of going to Normandy) but happier to escape,” he said. “I was damn lucky.”
After his work with Life, Morris became picture editor for the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine, was the first executive editor at Magnum Photos and then did turns as picture editor for the Washington Post and the New York Times before becoming a correspondent and editor for National Geographic.
Sixty years later, Morris is a living legend in photographic circles. He is as active as ever in Paris, occasionally writing for newspapers, working with a small French publisher to put together a book on Capa’s D-Day photos and organizes political rallies.
He notes the differences between the standards for war photos today and the censorship that he had to work with 60 years ago.
“During World War II, I would receive photos of stacks and stacks of bodies in Berlin,” he said. “I would take them to the censors who said, ‘You can have these back after the war.’
“The current torture pictures would never have got out,” he said.
Morris wrote in October 2001 that due to the terrorist attacks in New York City one month earlier, photojournalism was being reborn. Now, though more skeptical than he was 2 1/2 years ago, he is still encouraged by the media’s reaction to Iraq.
“We’re beginning to see pictures of both sides of the story. The public is beginning to see the light.”
