Robert Capa: the Journey of a Photographer
When I was a photography student and harboured slightly narcissistic dreams of becoming a documentary photographer, Robert Capa was one of my favourite photographers. I’ve always had a keen interest in Twentieth Century history and found Robert Capa’s story — which I shall attempt to retell here — one which interested me.
Robert Capa (born Endre Erno Friedmann) was one of the most famous war photographers of the Twentieth Century and covered a number of wars including the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the First Indochina War, where he was killed in 1954. Friedmann was born in Budapest (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1913 to a Jewish family.
In 1918 Friedmann was accused of being a communist sympathiser and was forced to flee. He travelled to Germany where he enrolled in the Berlin University. During this period he worked as a part-time darkroom assistant and later became a staff photographer for Dephot (which was a photographic agency). However this was a chaotic time in German history and as the Nazis came to power, Friedmann — who was Jewish — decided to flee to Paris.
The Creation of Robert Capa
It was in Paris that Robert Capa met Gerda Taro (Pohorylle) and the two of them struck up a romantic and professional relationship. During this period they shared a darkroom with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and created the pseudonym Robert Capa, who was a fictitious American photographer! It was at this point that Friedmann adopted the name Robert Capa. Both he and Taro published work under this pseudonym. Consequently many of Taro’s photographs are incorrectly attributed to Capa because they were usually filed together in archives.
The Falling Soldier by Robert Capa
© Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos
The Spanish Civil War
In 1936 Robert Capa and Gerda Taro covered the Spanish Civil War. Since World War One photographic equipment had come a long way, with photojournalists and documentary photographers using smaller 35mm rangefinder cameras, meaning photographers could get much closer to the action. This however also exposed war photographers to great danger and on July 26, 1937, Gerda Taro died of injuries (she was critically injured when a tank ran into the runningboard of the car on which she was travelling to flee the battle) sustained during the Battle of Brunete (6–25 July 1937). In subsequent biographies much has been made of Gerda Taro’s loss to Robert Capa, with much speculation that he never really got over it.
Despite the great advance in photographic techniques and equipment in the inter-war years, many photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War, and subsequently in the Second World War, where staged, often for propaganda purposes and due to restrictions placed on photojournalists. For example a controversial photograph taken by Robert Capa, which caused much debate, was the The Falling Soldier. The photograph taken on September 5th, 1936, depicts a Loyalist Militiaman at the moment of death during the Battle of Cerro Muriano. Later research has suggested the photograph was taken fifty-kilometres away (Espejo) and there has also been questions regarding the identity of the soldier in the photograph.
In 2007 negatives belonging to Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour we discovered in what is popularly know as ‘The Mexican Suitcase’. The negatives now belong to the Capa archives at the International Center of Photography. Whilst there is no negative for The Falling Soldier, there was plenty of photographs taken near-by and during the period in question, proving beyond doubt that the photograph of the The Falling Soldier was taken near Espejo.
Chinese Resistance to Imperial Japan
In 1938 Robert Capa travelled to Wuhan Province in China to document Chinese resistance to the invasion by Imperial Japan. Often overshadowed by the subsequent events in the Second World War, the Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937 and cost somewhere between 15–22 million lives. The struggle in China continued until Japan’s eventual defeat in 1945. Some of Robert Capa’s photographs from this period where published in Time Life magazine.
The Second World War
At the start of the Second World War, Robert Capa was in New York, having fled the Nazi’s invasion of Europe. Due to his Hungarian citizenship, Robert Capa was technically classed as an ‘illegal enemy alien’ until the situation was revolved (Robert Capa was granted US citizenship) and Robert Capa was granted press accreditation.
Robert Capa was employed by Colliers New York and took passage to Britain via the North Atlantic convoy system, a journey he documented with this camera and subsequently in his autobiography ‘Slightly Out of Focus’. In the United Kingdom he documented wartime Britain and London during the continued-Blitz.
Robert Capa next documented the Allied campaigns in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. This period is well documented in ‘Slightly Out of Focus’, which gives a subjective insight into the daily struggles of wartime a photojournalist! There are also plenty of rum stories about Algerian schnapps and nights drinking with Ernest Hemingway! It was during this period that Robert Capa produced some of his best work including the Funeral for twenty teenage partisans at the Liceo Sannazaro in the Vómero district which depicts a child’s coffin being carried through the streets with the teenager’s feet sticking out from the bottom of the coffin.
With the African and Italian campaigns concluded, Robert Capa was returned to Britain in preparation for Operation Overlord. On June 6th, 1944, Robert Capa was in one of the first waves to land on Omaha Beach. The operation was a close-run-thing and American casualties were very heavy. Capa did not remain on the beach for long and returned to the ships with his cameras and films so that he could meet the print deadline for the next day’s press. There is much controversy about what happened next; a young darkroom assistant purportedly to accidentally destroy most of the images by setting the darkroom heater too high. Other versions of this story instead name Larry Burrows, who would later go on to become a famous war photographer in Vietnam, as the culprit. Only eleven negatives were recovered and this set of photographs went on to be called the ‘Magnificent Eleven’.
However this version of events has later been called into question because the darkroom heaters used could not get hot enough to melt the emulsion on photographic film. An alternative narrative suggests that Capa only took eleven photographs on Omaha Beach before returning to the ships.
US Troops’ First Assault on Omaha Beach During the D-Day Landings
© Robert Capa © International Center of Photography | Magnum Photos
The End of the War in Europe
Following the Normandy Landings, Capa along with fellow photojournalists and war correspondents followed the Allied vanguard across Europe. At the end of the war Capa covered the Battle of Leipzig where he took the photograph The Picture of the Last Man to Die of an American soldier, Raymond J. Bowman, who was killed by a German sniper, on April 18th, 1945. The building has since been preserved and several streets named after Bowman and Capa.
Post-war Soviet Union
In 1947 Capa travelled to the Soviet Union with his friend John Steinbeck to document the Soviet Union’s recover after the Second World War. The pair of them collaborated on a book called A Russian Journal (1948). The book, which was published the following year, is described by Steinbeck as ‘honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn't know sufficiently.’ During their trip Capa and Steinbeck visited Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad and Soviet Georgia.
Magnum Photos
In 1947 Capa along with fellow photographers with Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Vandivert, David Seymour, and George Rodger founded the Magnum Photo agency. Headquartered in Paris, Magnum is famous for changing the way photojournalists were treated by the press. For example Magnum photographers retained the copyright to their images and editorials were not allowed to recontextualise their photos by changing the captions.
First Indochina War and death, 1954
In the early 1950s whist visiting Japan for Magnum Photos, Capa was asked to cover the war in Indochina where the French had been fighting since 1946. Despite supposedly being retired as a war photographer, Capa accepted the assignment. On May 25th, 1954, Capa was photographing the advance of a regiment in Thái Bình Province when he stepped on the landmine and was killed.
Robert Capa by Gerda Taro
Legacy
Robert Capa (and Gerda Taro) left an important legacy, despite many controversies, they help define modern war reportage and photojournalism. Through their work they reshaped documentary photography and helped created ‘the concerned photographer’ where-by the photographer is not necessarily a neutral bystander, but opinionated and involved, and above all a humanitarian!
Capa’s photography had a particular style, which at the time was rare. Many of his photographs have strong vertical elements or compositions. Capa photos often tried to capture the action, even if they were slightly out of focus! And the subjects of his photographs were not usually the generals and the top-brass, but the people who carried the burden of man’s endeavours!
In some ways, and no doubt partially because of what happen to him in his early years, Capa was a bit of a drifter. He did not do well being settled; and it was this inescapable reality which led to his final assignment.
