Robert Capa
Robert Capa was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.
Friedman fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager. He moved to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed Adolf Hitler's rise to power, which led him to move to Paris. There he met and began to work with his professional partner Gerda Taro, and they began to publish their work separately. Capa's close friendship with David Seymour-Chim was captured in Martha Gellhorn's novella Two by Two. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers.
During his career he risked his life numerous times, most dramatically as the only civilian photographer landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of Paris. His friends and colleagues included Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and director John Huston.
In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Hungary has issued a stamp and a gold coin in his honor.
He was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.
Early years
Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann to the Jewish family of Júlia and Dezső Friedmann in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, on October 22, 1913. His mother, Julianna Henrietta Berkovits was a native of Nagykapos and Dezső Friedmann came from the Transylvanian village of Csucsa. At the age of 18, he was accused of alleged communist sympathies and was forced to flee Hungary.He moved to Berlin, where he enrolled at Berlin University where he worked part-time as a darkroom assistant for income and then became a staff photographer for the German photographic agency, Dephot. It was during that period that the Nazi Party came into power, which made Capa, a Jew, decide to leave Germany and move to Paris.
Career
Capa's first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen on "The Meaning of the Russian Revolution" in 1932.After moving to Paris, he became professionally involved with Gerta Pohorylle, later known as Gerda Taro, a German-Jewish photographer who had moved to Paris for the same reasons he did. The two of them decided to work under the alias Capa at this time, and she contributed to much of the early work. However, the two of them later separated aliases, with Pohorylle quickly creating her own alias 'Gerda Taro', and began publishing their work independently. Capa and Taro developed a romantic relationship alongside their professional one. Capa proposed and Taro refused, but they continued their involvement. He also shared a darkroom with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he would later co-found the Magnum Photos cooperative.
Spanish Civil War, 1936
From 1936 to 1939, Capa worked in Spain, photographing the Spanish Civil War, along with Taro and David Seymour.It was during that war that Capa took the photo now called The Falling Soldier, purported to show the death of a Republican soldier. The photo was published in magazines in France and then by Life and Picture Post. The authenticity of the photo 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."
The next year, in 1937, Taro died when the motor vehicle on which she was traveling collided with an out-of-control tank. She had been returning from a photographic assignment covering the Battle of Brunete.
Capa accompanied then-journalist and author Ernest Hemingway to photograph the war, which Hemingway later described in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Life magazine published an article about Hemingway and his time in Spain, along with numerous photos by Capa.
In December 2007, three boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Capa, Taro, and Chim, which had been considered lost since 1939, were discovered in Mexico. In 2011, Trisha Ziff directed a film about those images, entitled The Mexican Suitcase.
Chinese resistance to Imperial Japan, 1938
In 1938, he traveled to the Chinese city of Hankou, now within Wuhan, to document the resistance to the Japanese invasion. He sent his images to Life magazine, which published some of them in its May 23, 1938, issue.World War II
At the start of World War II, Capa was in New York City, having moved there from Paris to look for work, and to escape Nazi persecution. During the war, Capa was sent to various parts of the European Theatre on photography assignments. He first photographed for Collier's Weekly, before switching to Life after he was fired by Collier's. He was the only "enemy alien" photographer for the Allies. On October 7, 1943, Robert Capa was in Naples with Life reporter Will Lang Jr., and there he photographed the Naples post office bombing.D-Day, Omaha beach, 1944
A group of images known as "The Magnificent Eleven" were taken by Capa on D-Day. Taking part in the Allied invasion, Capa was attached to the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division on Omaha Beach. The US personnel attacking Omaha Beach faced some of the heaviest resistance from German troops inside the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. Photographic historian A. D. Coleman has suggested that Capa traveled to the beach in the same landing craft as Colonel George A. Taylor, commander of the 16th Infantry Regiment, who landed 1½ hours after the first wave, near Colleville-sur-Mer.Capa subsequently stated that he took 106 pictures, but later discovered that all but 11 had been destroyed. This incident may have been caused by Capa's cameras becoming waterlogged at Normandy, although the more frequent allegation is that a young assistant accidentally destroyed the pictures while they were being developed at the photo lab in London. However, this narrative has been challenged by Coleman and others. In 2016, John G. Morris, who was picture editor at the London bureau of Life in 1944, agreed that it was more likely that Capa captured 11 images in total on D-Day. The 11 prints were included in Life magazine's issue on June 19, 1944, with captions written by magazine staffers, as Capa did not provide Life with notes or a verbal description of what they showed.
The captions have since been shown to be erroneous, as were subsequent descriptions of the images by Capa himself. For example, men described by Life as infantrymen taking cover behind a hedgehog obstacle during the assault landing were in fact members of Gap Assault Team 10 – a combined US Navy/US Army demolition unit tasked with blowing up obstacles and clearing the way for landing craft after the beach had been secured.
''The Shaved Woman of Chartres''
Capa took photographs during the Allied invasion of France in 1944. His picture The Shaved Woman of Chartres, taken on August 16, 1944, shows a woman whose head has been shaved as a punishment for collaboration with the Nazis.''[The Picture of the Last Man to Die]''
On April 18, 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 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
In 1947 Capa traveled to the Soviet Union with his friend, the American writer John Steinbeck. They originally met when they shared a room in an Algiers hotel with other war correspondents before the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. They reconnected in New York, where Steinbeck told him he was thinking about visiting the Soviet Union, now that the war was over.Capa suggested they go there together and collaborate on a book, with Capa documenting the war-torn nation with photographs. The trip resulted in Steinbeck's A Russian Journal, which was published both as a book and a syndicated newspaper serial. Photos were taken in Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi and among the ruins of Stalingrad. They remained good friends until Capa's death; Steinbeck took the news of Capa's death very hard.
Magnum Photos agency, 1947
In 1947, Capa founded the cooperative venture Magnum Photos in Paris with Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Vandivert, David Seymour, and George Rodger. It was 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.Founding of Israel, 1948
Capa toured Israel during its founding and while it was being attacked by neighboring states. He took the numerous photographs that accompanied Irwin Shaw's book, Report on Israel.Documenting film productions, 1953
In 1953 he joined screenwriter Truman Capote and director John Huston in Italy where Capa was assigned to photograph the making of the film, Beat the Devil. During their off time they, and star Humphrey Bogart, enjoyed playing poker.Capa also acted in the film Temptation, playing a supporting role. Allegedly, Capa received the part after visiting his friend Charles Korvin on the set. Capa claimed that he could play the part better than the actor who had originally been cast, and after speaking with the director was cast in the final film.