Robert Capa

photographer

Perhaps the greatest war photographer of all time, Hungarian-born Robert Capa covered five wars in 18 years, creating some of the most enduring images of war ever captured on film.
Guided by his own maxim, ‘…if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’’ Capa achieved an immediacy and intimacy in his photographs that revolutionised the way war was documented. His keen eye and preference for small-format cameras resulted in a distinctive style that combined rigorous formal composition with the dramatic impact of a snapshot and a sense of documentary authenticity, resulting in compelling and candid images that gave concrete visual expression to war and its effects. A pacifist and anti-war activist, Capa spent much of his life, and ultimately his death, photographing the human and sometimes inhuman face of the world’s conflicts.
Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann on 22 October 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, the second of three sons of Dezso and Julia Friedmann.
Capa became politically and socially aware at an early age, partly through his contact with the artist, poet and socialist Lajos Kassak, whom Capa met in 1929. Kassak introduced the young Capa to the photographic work of several Hungarian-born social documentary photographers, as well as the important images coming out of America at the time by the more famous reformer photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. Wanting to combine his twin interests in politics and literature, Capa soon aspired to a career in journalism. He also adopted many of Kassak’s reformist political beliefs and sympathies.
By the age of 17, he had participated in several local demonstrations and marches protesting government policies.
Capa’s burgeoning political activism led to his more radical participation in local protests and other forms of political agitation in Budapest against what he saw as an oppressive Hungarian government. His enthusiasm for reform also led him to meet briefly with a recruiter for the Hungarian Communist Party, and although Capa decided not to join the Communist organisation, his contact with one of its members led to his arrest and eventual expulsion from Hungary in the summer of 1931. Capa left his native Budapest to pursue a degree in journalism at the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik in Berlin, Germany.
Arriving in Berlin with minimal resources, Capa fatefully took a job as a darkroom assistant at Dephot, a photographic agency that represented a number of important photojournalists at the time.
Dephot’s director, Simon Guttmann, took a liking to Capa and eventually lent him an old Leica 35mm camera and allowed him to cover small local events for the agency. The Leica was a small, unobtrusive camera, well suited to the kind of close-up photojournalism that interested Capa and for which he was soon to become famous. His first major assignment as a photojournalist came in November 1932, when his superiors at Dephot sent him to Copenhagen, Denmark, to cover a speech by the exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Smuggling his inconspicuous Leica into the stadium and positioning himself close to where Trotsky was speaking, Capa secretly took a series of photographs that captured the energy of the passionate Russian orator and the drama of the speech. So much so that Berlin’s Der Welt Spiegel devoted a full page to Capa’s photographs.
With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in early 1933, Capa, who was both Jewish and a political activist, left Berlin. He eventually settled in Paris, where sometime in the spring of 1934, after a difficult period living in near poverty, Capa met fellow Hungarian André Kertész, a successful art photographer and photojournalist whose work regularly appeared in the French magazine Vu. Kertész helped the young Capa by lending him money, finding him work and teaching him about photography. It was also in Paris at this time that Capa became friends with David Szymin and Henri Cartier-Bresson, two young photographers with whom Capa would develop lifelong personal and professional relationships.
Cultivating both his photographic skills and professional contacts through this growing network of photographer friends in Paris, Capa finally began to make a name for himself as a photojournalist, initially with a series of well-received photographs for the Parisian newspaper Regards, documenting the political marches and strikes associated with the left-wing Popular Front campaign in the run-up to the 1936 elections.
In the summer of that year, Capa and his companion Gerda Taro made the first of several trips to Spain to cover the civil war that had recently broken out there. Using mainly his Leica, Capa produced a highly regarded series of photographs documenting the fighting in north-eastern and southern Spain. And it was in the south, near the city of Cordoba, that Capa took one of the most iconic photographs ever taken: his famous image of a Spanish Republican soldier at the precise moment of his death. This and other Capa photographs from the Spanish front were published in a number of high-circulation newspapers and prestigious magazines in France and Britain, and the American magazine Life published a series of his images documenting the siege of Madrid and the plight of its inhabitants.
Capa’s acclaimed photographs of the Spanish Civil War heralded his arrival on the world stage as a leading photojournalist, and on his return to Paris he published a book of his and Taro’s photographs from Spain entitled Death in the Making, which he dedicated to Taro, who had died while covering the conflict.
In 1938, the now famous Capa went to China with filmmaker Joris Ivens to photograph another war: the Japanese invasion of China. Capa covered the Sino-Japanese War for six months, once again producing graphic, straightforward visual evidence of war and its effects on a local population.
His sought-after images appeared in Life and elsewhere, and his photographs documenting the Japanese bombing of the Chinese city of Hankou are among his most successful.
On his return to Europe, Capa worked on a variety of assignments, most notably a piece on orphanages in Biarritz, France, an in-depth assignment on the Tour de France bicycle race for the French magazine Match, and a series of stories documenting the working class and unemployed in and around Antwerp, Belgium. In 1940, he spent several months in Mexico covering the political rallies and usually violent protests leading up to that country’s presidential election.
With the outbreak of World War II, Capa worked on a number of assignments devoted to the Allied war effort for news agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, but primarily in England for Collier’s magazine and then as European correspondent for Life. His photographs of London during the Blitz accompanied the text for a book published in 1941, The Battle of Waterloo Bridge, which documented the resilience of working-class Londoners during and after the extensive aerial bombardment of the city by the Germans.
During the late spring and summer of 1943, Capa covered the Allied campaigns in North Africa and Sicily under General George S. Patton, and he spent the rest of the year documenting the Allied advance on various battlefronts on the Italian mainland, including the liberation of Naples and the fighting for Anzio. On the historic occasion of D-Day on 6 June 1944, Capa accompanied the first wave of American troops landing on Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast of France, capturing some of the most memorable and iconic images of the Second World War in the water and on the beach during the chaotic opening moments of the liberation of France.
To document the Allied landings at Omaha Beach, Capa carried two 35mm Contax cameras and a Rolleiflex, and while many of the photographs he risked his life to take that day were accidentally either destroyed or damaged in a darkroom mishap back in England, those that survived – including his famous image of soldiers wading ashore from their landing craft – appeared in Life magazine and were hailed as the best photographs of the invasion.
From the beaches of Normandy, Capa covered the Allied advance through to the liberation of Paris in August 1944, accompanying the French 2nd Armoured Division into the capital. In Paris, he documented the delirium of the newly liberated inhabitants and their help in eliminating pockets of German resistance. After the liberation of Paris, Capa went on to cover the fighting that winter in the Ardennes – which would become known as the Battle of the Bulge – where he took a series of dramatic photographs of German soldiers surrendering to Allied forces. He also parachuted into Germany with American troops in 1945 and was on hand to photograph the key Allied victories at Leipzig, Nuremberg and Berlin. As in every conflict he covered, during the Second World War Capa turned his lens not only on the soldiers and the frontline action, but also on the local population and the war’s impact on them, often capturing telling moments in the expressions and gestures of those around him.
Throughout the war, Capa’s images of soldiers and civilians appeared regularly in Life and Collier’s in America and Weekly Illustrated in Britain. For his efforts during the war, Capa was awarded the United States Medal of Freedom in 1947, along with 20 other World War II correspondents.
Soon after the war, Capa became an American citizen and in 1946 spent several months in Los Angeles,California, during which time he wrote his war memoir, Slightly Out of Focus, and briefly aspired to become a director and producer. In 1947, he teamed up with his old friends Cartier-Bresson and Szymin (who was now known as David Seymour and his pseudonym ‘Chim’), as well as George Rodger and William Vandivert, to found the international photographic agency Magnum Photos. Now living mainly in Paris, Capa devoted himself to Magnum, overseeing operations in the cooperative’s New York and Paris offices and supporting the agency’s young photographers.
In addition to running Magnum, Capa worked on a number of travel books in the late 1940s, including one documenting a month-long trip he took with John Steinbeck to the Soviet Union in 1947. In May 1948, Capa also made the first of three trips to Israel, where he covered the young country’s declaration of independence and the ensuing war with its Arab neighbours for Illustrated. On his two subsequent trips to Israel, Capa focused his lens on the flood of refugees arriving in and around Haifa, photographing their living conditions in the immigrant camps set up to process and temporarily house them.
During the early years of the 1950s, Capa avoided most political assignments and instead spent much of his time in Paris, working for Magnum and writing a series of light-hearted travel articles for Holiday magazine. In the spring of 1954, he went to Japan to shoot a series of photographs for Mainichi Press on children, a subject that had interested Capa throughout his career in times of war and peace. Indeed, many of Capa’s images of children from throughout his career achieve the same sense of immediacy and intimacy that became the hallmark of his more celebrated battlefield images.
Capa’s six-week assignment in Japan lasted only three weeks, however, as Life magazine, in need of an emergency replacement photographer, sent him to cover the war in what was then known as French Indochina.
Shortly after arriving in the capital, Hanoi, he left for Laos to photograph the release of French soldiers captured by the Viet Minh during their historic victory at Dienbienphu. Capa then returned to Hanoi, where he spent several days photographing the city’s inhabitants and their daily routines. On 25 May, Capa accompanied a French convoy on a mission to evacuate two outposts, documenting the soldiers’ slow advance through the hostile terrain of the Red River Delta. While apparently manoeuvring to photograph a column of soldiers advancing across a meadow, Capa, Contax camera in hand, stepped on a land mine and was killed almost instantly.
Days after his death, the French military awarded Capa one of its highest honours, the Croix de Guerre with Palm. In 1955, the Overseas Press Club and Life magazine jointly established the annual Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, given to photojournalists who demonstrate exceptional courage and enterprise while working abroad. In 1958, Robert’s brother Cornell Capa and his mother Julia Friedmann, together with David Seymour’s sister, established the Robert Capa-David Seymour Photographic Foundation in Israel. Eight years later, in 1966, the Werner Bischof-Robert Capa-David Seymour Photographic Memorial Fund was established to celebrate and support the work of these and other photojournalists, which in 1974 became the International Center of Photography in New York City. In 1976, Capa was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.