Biography
Robert Capa born Endre Friedmann was born on October 22, 1913, to a Jewish Family of Julia (née Berkovits) and Dezső Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary. Robert Capa’s mother, Julianna Henrietta Berkovits was a native of Nagykapos (now Veľké Kapušany Slovakia) and Dezső Friedmann came from the Transylvanian village of Csucsa (now Ciucea, Romania). At the age of 18, he was accused of alleged communist sympathies and he fled Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled at Berlin University. Between 1931 and 1932 Capa worked for Dephot, a German picture agency, where he worked part-time as a darkroom assistant for income and then became a staff photographer. It was during that period that the Nazi Party came into power, which made Capa, a Jew, decide to leave Germany and he went to settled up in Paris, where he got the name Robert Capa.
He worked professionally with Gerta Pohorylle, later known as Gerda Taro a German-Jewish photographer who had moved to Paris for the same reasons he did. The both of them decided to work under the alias Capa at this time. Both of them later separated aliases and published their work independently. Capa fell in love with Taro and both of them developed a romantic relationship alongside their professional one. Capa later proposed to Taro but she refused, but they continued their involvement. He also shared a darkroom with French photographer Henri Cartier – Bresson, with whom he would later co-founded the Magnum Photos Agency.
Capa’s first photograph published was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen on “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution” in 1932.
Bodies of work
Spanish Civil War, 1936
Capa worked in Spain from 1936 to 1939, photographing the Spanish Civil War, along with Gerda Taro, his companion and professional photography partner, and David Seymour. His first major fame was achieved as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. He grew maturely and his style fully emerged in grim, close-up views of death such as Loyalist Soldier, Spain. Such immediate images embodied Capa’s famous saying, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough.” Taro died when the motor vehicle on which she was travelling collided with an out-of-control tank. She was returning from a photographic assignment which she was covering the Battle of Brunete. It was during that war that Capa took the photo now called ” The Falling Soldier”, purporting to show the death of a Republican soldier. The photograph was published in magazines in France and then by Life Magazine and Picture Post. The authenticity of the photograph was later questioned, with evidence including other photos from the scene suggesting it was staged. Picture Post, a pioneering photojournalism magazine published in the United Kingdom, had once described then twenty-five-year-old Capa as “the greatest war photographer in the world.”
Capa accompanied then journalist and author Ernest Hemingway to photograph the war, which Hemingway would later describe in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). An article about Hemingway and his time in Spain was published by Life magazine along with numerous photos by Capa.
Three different boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Capa, Taro, and Chim (David Seymour), which had been considered lost since 1939, were discovered in Mexico In December 2007. Trisha Ziff directed a film about those images, entitled The Mexican Suitcase In 2011.
Chinese Resistance to Imperial Japan, 1938
In 1938, Robert Capa traveled to the Chinese city of Hankou, now within Wuhan, to document the resistance to the Japanese Invasion. Capa’s images were sent to Life magazine, which published some of them in its May 23, 1938 issue.
World War II
At the time the World War II started, Capa was in New York City, having moved there from Paris to look for work, and to escape Nazi persecution. Capa was sent to various parts of the European Theatre on photography assignments During the war. He took photographs for Colliers Weekly, before switching to Life after he was fired by Collier’s. He was nicknamed the only “enemy alien” photographer for the Allies. On the 7th of October 1943, Robert Capa was in Naples with Life reporter Will Lang Jr, and there he photographed the Naples post office bombing.
The picture of the last man to die
On the 18th of April 1945, Capa captured images of a fight to secure a bridge in Leipzig, Germany. These pictures included an image of Raymond J. Bowman’s death by sniper fire. This particular image was published in a spread in Life magazine with the caption “The picture of the last man to die.”
Post-War Soviet Union, 1947
Capa traveled to the Soviet Union with his friend, the American writer John Steinbeck In 1947.
Originally, they met when they shared a room in an Algiers hotel with other war correspondents before the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. They eventually reconnected in New York, where Steinbeck told him he was thinking about visiting the Soviet Union, now that the war was over.
Robert Capa suggested they go there together and collaborate on a book, with Capa documenting the war-torn nation with photographs. Their trip resulted in Steinbeck’s, A Russian Journal, which was published both as a book and a syndicated newspaper serial. Several photos were taken in Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and among the ruins of Stalingrad. They later remained good friends until Capa’s death; Steinbeck took the news of Capa’s death very hard.
Magnum Photos Agency, 1947
Capa founded the cooperative venture Magnum Photos in Paris with Henri Cartier-Bresson William Vandivert, David Seymour, and George Rodger in 1947. Capa established a cooperative agency to manage work for and by freelance photographers, and developed a reputation for the excellence of its photo-journalists. In 1952, he became the president.
Documenting film productions, 1953
He joined screenwriter Truman Capote and director John Huston in Italy in 1953 where Capa was assigned to photograph the making of the film, Beat the Devil. During their off time Capa, and star Humphrey Bogart, would enjoy playing poker.
First Indochina War and Death, 1954
Capa traveled to Japan for an exhibition associated with Magnum Photos In the early 1950s. While he was there Life magazine asked him to go on assignment to South-east Asia, where the French had been fighting for eight years in the First Indochina War. Although few years earlier he had said he was finished with war, Capa accepted and accompanied a French regiment with two Time–Life journalists, John Mecklin and Jim Lucas in Thai Binh Province. On 25th of May 1954, the regiment was passing through a dangerous area under fire when Capa decided to leave his Jeep and go up the road to photograph the advance. Capa was killed when he stepped on a land mine. He died at 40 years of age at the time of his death. He is buried in plot #189 at Amawalk Hill Cemetery (also called Friends Cemetery), Amawalk, Westchester County, New York along with his mother, Julia, and his brother, Cornell Capa.
Critique and Impressions
My Opinion of Robert Capa work is that he had a strong zeal for his work and was always putting his life dangerously at risk when it comes to photography. He was not interested in having all the riches of the world and He is considered by most people to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.
Capa just wanted to express and also demonstrate his craft. Personally, I’m not always a big fan of arts but somehow, I am impressed with Capa’s work ethic and ambition. Capa’s photographs demonstrate Hungarian combat photographer Robert Capa is best known for redefining wartime photojournalism by insisting working in trenches, in the midst of combat.
All Capa’s photographs always have zeal and ambition and also curiosity about the project and his subjects. Capa’s art is about the spectacle or the view of things seen. He took pictures of wars and different wars going on around the world. This action makes viewers of his projects surprised or so absorbed in contemplation and suddenly, which makes us sucked in it too, only to leave us wondering about what we are staring at because there is nothing to explain the work.
I became aware that not just taking pictures of sudden things happening on the war front but you have to be able to take the pictures at the right time and at the right place.
Robert Capa for me happens to be the most influential artists of all time in modern photography.
I am very much impressed by the impact he has made on modern photography and by his lifestyle he was very independent and has a good zeal or passion about his work.
Capa’s talent really spoke for him. He was always on the road from one war zone to the other just to take the perfect shot which was very inspiring to me.
References
Essay about Robert Capa. Wikipedia [online]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Capa [Accessed 16 January 2019].
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