Photo by Tim Street

John Morris shares with the Ernie Pyle class in his Paris home.

He calls photographer Robert Capa his "Hungarian brother," says he should have died in the bombing of Saint Lo and shared a tent with Ernie Pyle – but John Morris is surprisingly down-to-earth.

Friday morning, all 30 of us descended on Morris’ home near the Bastille. He kindly agreed to talk with us even though he was about to leave for a meeting in Brussels. Morris was a photo editor for Life magazine during WWII; he said he only picked up a camera and shot news photos when a photographer didn’t show up for an assignment.

In the Ernie Pyle class we’ve been hearing a lot about the lives of foreign correspondents during World War II, of course focusing on Pyle himself. I haven’t spent too much time thinking about what life must’ve been like for photographers at the time. So, it was interesting to hear how that side of things worked. In this digital era, the idea that entire of rolls of film, film a journalist risked his life for, were simply lost, dropped in the sea or ruined in a photo lab accident, is in a way very foreign.  That second one happened to Capa.  

Photo by Tim Street

John Morris

The only photographer to get images showing any real action during D-Day, Capa ran out in front of the advancing American troops and photographed them as they came ashore. I’ve seen the photos on numerous occasions, but I hadn’t realized until today that only 11 of the images Capa shot (including 4 rolls of 35mm) were publishable. A lab tech ruined the others as he rushed to develop them for the censors.

I asked Morris what Capa’s reaction had been when he found out the film was lost. Morris laughed, said he’d been asked that question a lot, but he wasn’t quite sure.

"I’m sure he was disappointed, but he never said anything to me," Capa said.  "Capa wrote to his mother about his disappointment when he lost the film, but he didn’t really react much at the time."

Although Morris shared a tent with Ernie Pyle, they rarely saw each other.  But, on the day Morris decided to head back to his editing post in London he said Pyle took the time to wish him well and say goodbye.   

Just before Morris had to say goodbye the issue of ethics came up, as it had in London when we visited with John Burns. One of the students asked Morris what he saw as the major ethical issues facing photographers.  He mentioned the problems of deciding how to shoot something and whether to run a photo or not.  But there was another thing he thought was more important.

"For me the bigger problem is the things we don’t photograph," Burns said.  "There are a lot of things that just don’t get covered that should."
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