Robert Capa was a Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist. He is best known for photographing and documenting parts of WW2 in North Africa, England, and Italy. His photos, like those captured during the Spanish Civil War and the 1944 Normandy assault, portray the violence of conflict with a distinctive impact.
Background
Capa was born Endre Friedmann to the Jewish family of Júlia (née Berkovits) and Dezső Friedmann in Budapest, Austria-Hungary on October 22, 1913. His 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).
Education
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, decided to leave Germany and move to Paris.
Career
Robert Capa wished to be a writer, but he got a photographer's job and eventually, he started liking it. His first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making the 'Meaning of the Russian Revolution' speech at Copenhagen in 1932.
In 1933 he moved to France as the Jewish journalists and photographers were being persecuted in Germany with the rise of Nazism.
Fearing for his life he chucked his Jewish name and adopted the name “Robert Capa”, as he believed this was more American-sounding. The name change even helped him in selling his photos.
He photographed the Spanish Civil War along with Gerda Taro and David Seymour from 1936 to 1939. While fleeing Europe in 1939, Capa lost some part of this collection, which resurfaced decades later in 1990 in Mexico City.
In 1936, he became globally renowned for his 'Falling Soldier' photograph taken at the Cordoba Front, where a loyalist militiaman had been shot and was in the act of falling to his death. A photograph with such dexterity became controversial and its authenticity was doubted.
In 1938, he went to Hankow (now Wuhan) in China to document their resistance against the Japanese invasion and moved to New York City before the beginning of World War II. During the war, he worked for ‘Collier's Weekly’ and ‘Life’ magazine.
During the Allied invasion in 1944, he was with the first wave of American troops on Omaha Beach that faced the heaviest resistance from German troops in the Atlantikwall bunkers. Capa took a total of 106 pictures but only 11 survived after a photo lab accident in London.
Capa went to the Soviet Union in 1947 with his American-writer friend John Steinbeck, whose journal 'A Russian Journal' (1948) was illustrated with Capa's photos. The photos were taken in Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and the ruins of Stalingrad.
In 1947 he, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Vandivert, David Seymour and George Rodger founded the cooperative venture, Magnum Photos in Paris. The agency managed work for, and by freelance photographers. He became its president in 1952.
In the early 1950s, he went to Japan for a Magnum Photos' exhibition. Although a 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 Thái Bình Province. On 25 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 was 40 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.
Kassák's anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, pro-labor, egalitarian, and pacifist beliefs influenced Capa the rest of his life.
As a young boy, Capa was drawn to the Munkakör (Employment Circle), a group of socialist and avant-garde artists, photographers, and intellectuals centered around Budapest. He participated in the demonstrations against the Miklós Horthy regime. In 1931, just before his first photo was published, Capa was arrested by the Hungarian secret police, beaten, and jailed for his radical political activity. A police official's wife—who happened to know his family—won Capa's release on the condition that he would leave Hungary immediately.
The Boston Review has described Capa as "a leftist, and a democrat—he was passionately pro-Loyalist and passionately anti-fascist ..." During the Spanish Civil War, Capa travelled with and photographed the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), which resulted in his best-known photograph.
The British magazine Picture Post ran his photos from Spain in the 1930s accompanied by a portrait of Capa, in profile, with the simple description: "He is a passionate democrat, and he lives to take photographs."
Views
Quotations:
Capa said, "We named this unknown generation, The Generation X, and even in our first enthusiasm we realised that we had something far bigger than our talents and pockets could cope with."
"All you could do was to help individuals caught up in war, try to raise their spirits for a moment, perhaps flirt a little, make them laugh; ... and you could photograph them, to let them know that somebody cared."
Personality
He was impassioned, and therefore his photos always had a certain bias, but it was a humane bias. He hated war, never glorified it, and never saw himself as heroic. Despite his saying, "If your photos aren't good enough, you aren't close enough, " he never took chances unless the photo demanded it."
Connections
In 1934, Robert Capa met and fell in love with a German Jewish refugee named Gerda Pohorylle. She later changed her name to Gerda Taro. She was killed during a battle in Madrid and this loss broke him and he never married.
In 1943 he met a lady named Elaine Justin, who was already married to the actor John Justin. They became involved in a relationship but broke up in 1945.
Later on he started dating actress Ingrid Bergman and went to Hollywood with her. There he worked for American International Pictures for some time. But they parted ways when he left for Turkey in 1946.