On Tuesday 11 November, John G Morris, former picture editor for Life magazine, joined guests at the Frontline Club to share his photographs and experiences in Normandy towards the end World War II. Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images and editor of Morris‘s book Quelque Part En France, joined his good friend to give insight into the process of collecting the photographs from 1944 and creating the book, which will hopefully be published in English soon.

Pledge introduced “John Morris, not the picture editor, not the historian . . . but John Morris the photographer”.

John G Morris (left) and Robert Pledge (right) discuss Morris’s experiences and photography in Normandy.

He described Morris as “. . . undoubtably one of the most knowledgeable people in the field. . . . We didn’t know until about a couple of years ago that John not only could speak about photography but he had been a photographer himself for a very short period of time.”

The compelling photographs chosen from the book, illustrated French citizens, troops and the effects of World War II in Normandy. Servicemen were forbidden to disclose where in France they were writing from, hence the title Quelque Part En France, or Somewhere in France.

The 168 photographs that Morris took, were “images that are so very different to those of war photographers . . . who were more concerned about the action”, said Pledge. “John saw things and registered things that most photographers did not.”

The pictures show “little everyday scenes in the French countryside and small towns”. And in his capturing of them he was “a very fine, subtle observer of war in a dramatic environment”, said Pledge.

Robert Pledge shows Quelque part en France to guests.

Despite having his photographs displayed and commended around the world, Morris can not become accustomed to being called a photographer.

He said, “When you have the privilege of working with the greatest photographers of the 20th century . . . you don’t call yourself a photographer. . . . I still don’t think I’m a photographer.”

Morris worked with photographer Robert Capa in France:

“From Capa I learnt to look for the human message. . . . Photographers have to also pay attention to words,” said Morris.

Morris affirmed that his photographs did not influence his editing, and shared why he did not continue taking photographs after that trip:

“My job was being a picture editor,” he said. “My job was either to assist photographers or boss them around, not to compete with them. . . . It was just a camera I happened to borrow, . . . it was obvious I was a tight shooter.” But, he admitted, “The pictures are better than I thought they were.”

An audience member asked about censorship in the media during World War II. Morris said, “Censorship mostly, quite frankly, . . . occurred at the level of shooting. Photographers knew what not to shoot.”

Morris said that his book is a “testament to French people, it’s a love letter to France in a sense. I am very proud of that.”

He said, “Here were the French people subjected to terrible attack . . . and despite that, we were welcomed as liberators. . . . I share the dismay of my generation . . . with the present state, the state of world affairs. I’m a peacemaker from way back.”

“The images of yours have a tremendous impact today,” Pledge said to Morris, adding to the audience, “John never believed this could happen. He never took his images seriously as photographs, he took them as notes. . . . He was not trying to produce photographs.”

“History can be observed on various levels and one of them is just the common level of human reactions to ordinary situations,” Morris said.

You can watch and listen again here:

The changing face of war reporting for female journalists was the topic of conversation at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 11 February, with a special insight into two women who pioneered the trade – Clare Hollingworth and Gerda Taro.

Discussing the first female war correspondents. L-R: Kate Brooks, Deborah Haynes, Jane Rogoyska and Patrick Garrett.

Patrick Garrett, a former journalist and nephew to Hollingworth, told the audience of his aunt’s extraordinary daring and resolve, a subject he is exploring in a book about her life. After moving to Poland with the League of Nations, she almost fell into journalism, first working as the Polish correspondent for The Telegraph. Before long she was legendary, most famously breaking the news that WWII had started.

Garrett took the audience through Hollingworth’s journey as a foreign correspondent – with pictures of her in Africa, on the banks of the Suez, and as a 65-years-old reporting from China.

“At 70 she began writing as the first female defence correspondent for The Telegraph!”

At 102-years-old she is now living in Hong Kong, with her passport still by her bedside and shoes on the floor ready to go, just in case the newspaper calls.

But where one pioneering female correspondent’s long life is filled with stories, another’s was cut tragically short. Writer and filmmaker Jane Rogoyska revisits the late Gerda Taro in her new book Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa and told the audience the story of an incredible photojournalist who was killed at only 26-years-old in the Spanish Civil War.

Taro’s life changed when, in Paris, she met Endre Friedmann, a handsome Hungarian photographer who was struggling to establish himself.

“What he brought to her was photography, and she brought to him was intelligence, drive and business sense,” said Rogoyska. “As they struggled, they couldn’t make ends meet, they came up with the idea of inventing someone else – a wealthy American called Robert Capa.”

Together they decided to cover Spanish Civil War.

“She started as the pupil, but she started to feel overshadowed by this very enormous talent. They would always put their photographs under the name of Capa, then she came to the realisation that Capa was him, and where was she?” Rogoyska added.

She went solo, and at the age of 26 in 1937, at the Battle of Brunete, she became “too involved and stayed too long at the front”. She was killed accidentally by an out of control Republican tank.

“Since the first women correspondents, how far have we come?” an audience member asked. The Times’ first defence editor Deborah Haynes, who was chairing the event, responded saying: “I became the first female defence editor for The Times, which is a sign of how . . . there are still glass ceilings to break through.”

Award-winning photojournalist Kate Brooks added: “Now, there are many, many more female correspondents and war correspondents.”

“I was counting before how many women photographers who are well known for regularly covering conflict, over the last 30 years, and we are still talking about only a couple of dozen women. It’s a small circle and we all know each other.”

 

“But lots of things have changed, there was an article on TheAtlantic.com that pointed out that the bureau chiefs of NPR, Time Magazine and New York Times in Beirut are all women, married and have children, but very much focused on covering Syria. You wouldn’t have found that twenty years ago,” said Brooks.

Another audience member asked whether women brought anything different to the role than men, and Brooks pointed out that “working in the Muslim world, as a woman you get better access to cover stories about women”. When asked if this meant it was harder to cover men, she disagreed. “As a foreign woman, I’m almost a third gender,” she said.

Garrett told the audience about how Hollingworth’s gender helped her, even back in the day when women reporters were rare.

“When women were evacuated from Cairo to South Africa, because of the shortage of women, she was always being invited to balls and dances,” he said. “That gave her very good [military] contacts!”

You can listen to or watch the full discussion below:

The Mexican Suitcase Director, Trisha Ziff

On the 5th of November filmmaker Trisha Ziff brought her widely acclaimed film The Mexican Suitcase to the Frontline Club. Thought lost since 1939, the group of three boxes full of negatives by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David ‘Chim’ Seymour, known as The Mexican Suitcase, was uncovered in Mexico by Ziff in 2007 with help from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

The Mexican Suitcase

The film charts the journey of the Mexican Suitcase after it left the hands of Capa’s assistant Chiki Weisz in Paris as the Nazis approached and in turn the journey of the Spanish people who were exiled in Mexico after the war. Ziff started the Q&A by telling the story of how she came across the story of the Mexican Suitcase:

“I happened to be in ICP in New York, we were doing a show … that was coming to Mexico, and Brian Wallis [chief curator at the ICP] said to me ‘oh by the way we have these letters on file from this guy in Mexico, maybe he has these photographs and because we’re going to Mexico would you be interested in seeing if you can find him?’”

“[Ben Tarver, the man who had exchanged letters with the ICP] met with me and he came with three photocopies of three negatives that were clearly real … he allowed me to photocopy the photocopies of the contact sheets and then I scanned them and sent them to ICP. That’s when we knew that it was really real and within 8 months of me getting involved in the narrative, the negatives were in the hands of the estates of the three photographers.”

The film focuses heavily on the idea of memory and closure for the Spanish people who were exiled in Mexico and an archaeological dig at a mass grave in Spain.

“For me there was this whole thing that came into my head at the mass grave that putting these images in frames and white mounts, it kind of takes you away from it. The literal digging into the earth for me was like this notion of going behind the emulsion some how.”

One of the most common questions Ziff is asked is about whether the suitcase contains any clues to the context of Capa’s photograph The Falling Solider:

“That was the first question off the lips at ICP, “is it there, is it in the box?” … my fantasy of why there was this ambivalence to find the Mexican Suitcase on the part of Cornell [Capa, Robert Capa’s brother] and ICP [they had had the letters from Tarver for over 10 years] was about the closure of the Fallen Solider. Were they going to find it? Was it going to give new answers, was it going to enhance the debate?”

“There’s one square in the box where there’s nothing, people can fanaticise that that’s where the fallen solider might have been. It’s not there, so who knows? We’ll never know. And in a way, who cares?”

And finally, on bringing the suitcase to New York Ziff faced much criticism from an opposition of photographers and historians who said that it should stay in Mexico:

“It was controversial, quite a few photographers didn’t respect me for it … People are very proud in Mexico, of Mexico’s role in relation to opening its doors to the refugees … Mexico also doesn’t have an infrastructure to really take care of those kind of negatives other than the foundation of Televisa which is a private TV company and if they’d have gone there then no-one would have seen it … all the images have been scanned, the negatives are basically in a fridge in New York … Capa’s brother Cornell was alive, he held those boxes in his hands before he died, for me it was a non-argument I would actually do it again tomorrow.”

Trisha Ziff on bringing the Mexican Suitcase to New York: