An Essay on Robert Capa

An Essay on Robert Capa
Seán Durack

First, here are some of his pictures.

Robert Capa was born Endre Erno Friedmann to Dezső and Júlia Friedmann-Berkovits, a middle class Jewish Family in Budapest Hungary on October 22 1913.  He covered five wars from 1936 to 1954, the Spanish Civil War, The Second Cino-Japanese War, World War II, the Arab-Israeli War and the first Indochina War.

Unless otherwise stated Richard Whelan’s book Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection was the source for much of Capa’s biographical information in the essay.¹  Robert Capa was exiled from Hungary at the age of 18 because of his participation in leftist, pro-labour demonstrations and moved to Berlin, Germany.  Already he had established his political views. He had originally wanted to become a writer but eventually took up photography instead. He had worked as an errand boy at the Dephot photo agency advancing rapidly to dark room assistant and soon afterward to photographer. His mentor was poet and artist Lajos Kassák.   Due the rise of Nazism he left Germany in 1933 to go to France. It was around this time that he changed his name to Robert Capa it is said because it sounded American and it was similar to the name of famous American Director Frank Capra. Another reason was because of its indeterminate nationality. The name was thought up by Capa and his girlfriend Greda Taro who was a talented photo-journalist in her own right. Taro had sold Capa’s first pictures to European editors as a result his work ended up appearing in such magazines as Life and Regards (Mifflin, 2010, p. 258).² 

It was at around the same time that he met David Seymour known as “Chim”, a talented artist who persuaded the editors of Regards to give Capa a job covering the French Populaire Movement. Seymour ended up being a companion and professional photography partner of Capa’s. (museum.icp.org).³

Robert Capa’s first published work was that of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen on the Meaning of the Russian Revolution in 1932. Capa covered the Spanish Civil War from the year 1936 to 1939 with David Seymour. He distinguished himself as a photojournalist   during that war. It was also in 1936 that he became famous across the globe for a picture known as The Falling Soldier which is a shot of a militiaman about to fall to the ground immediately after being shot. Its authenticity had been in disputed but since authenticated, it remains one of Capa’s most remarkable shots. In 1937 Capa’s partner Taro, was killed by an out of control tank while photographing a confused retreat from the running board of a car. Capa was very much affected by this.  He would continue on covering the war in Spain until the defeat and exile of the Republicans in 1939 (Mifflin, 2010, p.258).⁴  

Capa had moved from Paris to New York City to escape Nazi Persecution at the start of World War II. His coverage of the war took him to various parts of Europe.  He photographed the Naples Post Office bombing on October 7 1943 while on an assignment in Italy. He was working for Life Magazine at the time and he was the only enemy alien photographer for the allies which meant that he was in a state of conflict with the country he was located in. It was during World War II where he obtained his most famous work on June 6 1944 (D Day). Here he swam ashore the second assault wave on Omaha Beach. He took 106 photographs during the first couple of hours of the invasion.  Life Magazine printed ten of the frames in its June 19^th 1944 issue.

Capa was the lover of famous Hollywood actress Ingrid Bergman for several months. They had met while she was travelling in Europe. Capa followed her to Hollywood in December 1945 where he worked for American International Pictures for a very short time. Bergman proposed to Capa but he didn’t want to live in Hollywood. The relationship ended in the summer of 1946 when Capa travelled to Turkey.

Capa moved in artistic circles where he was friendly with writers and artists. He photographed the good times with his artist friends including Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. He was friendly with film director John Huston. He travelled to the Soviet Union with the writer John Steinbeck in 1947. He took photographs in Moscow Tbilisi, Batumi and among the ruins of Stalingrad. A Russian journal known as The Humorous Reportage of John Steinbeck was illustrated with these photos and was first published in 1948.

In 1947 Capa, Chim and other notable photographer friends such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and Bill Vandivert began a picture agency named Magnum. All four of these men had experienced the horrors of World War II. Capa spent the next few years making Magnum into a successful cooperative committed to radical documentary practices and new techniques. The Magnum photographers set the standard for the world of photojournalism. Capa covered the Arab Israeli War in 1948

It was there that he stepped on a landmine and was killed instantly. This occurred on May 1954. He was only 40 years of age.  The French Army awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Palm post-humously. The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award was established in 1955 to reward exceptional professional merit (Magnum Photos).⁵

The American photographer Edward Steichen once said that the best documentary photographs are “the most remarkable human documents…ever rendered”. Our own opinion of such documents is helped when we consider the possible motives of the photographer, background and circumstance of the subject, the intended and actual uses of the image, and archivists are interested in who will collect and preserve the photograph, how it will be processed and catalogued and how its presence in a museum will affect the way it might be viewed, influencing the way it might be viewed.

As Mifflin (2010, p.251) states “Documentary photographers are typically motivated by the desire for change.  The main goal of the photographer is to highlight a social or economic problem or direct attention to the horrors of a particular situation”.⁶ The statement is true of Capa himself and his images.  Capa had very definite political leftist views and was an activist. He experienced the rise of Nazism and had seen the effects of that regime on humankind. He was passionate about his beliefs and as Whelan points out he had the courage of his convictions and would have died for his beliefs.  This is the main motivating factors behind Capa’s camera work.  He had a moral code in relation to his work in that he believed that he should experience the hardships and risks that men in combat did. This won him trust and respect which allowed him to become close to the subject. During his career he said he was unwilling to risk his life in a war situation in which he did not take a side. This belief was tested when he was sent as a replacement photographer to the Indochina War because he had no real stake in it.   

He was drawn to the need to document the reality of war.  He was in influential in redefining wartime journalism. He was considered the most fearless photographer of his generation. Although Whelan notes that he was not reckless. He was one of the first photographers to capture the authenticity of war in a really honest way and his ability to capture images up close and personal had become revolutionary in the world of photography. His famous quote was “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” sums up this approach to his work.   His intended use and actual use of the image were one and the same.  His photographs were published in Life magazine. The magazine’s place in the history of photojournalism was central. People such as Winston Churchill published their memoirs in it. Capa’s images therefore reached and impacted on a large readership.

According to Lifson, Capa’s innovation as a photographer is evident because “he was always self-consciously experimenting with photographic syntax”. He had inherited this from a generation of photographers working in the late twenties but in fact his photographs broke with the many of the journalistic conventions of only a few years earlier. It could be argued that he was an artist more so than a photographer because he could transform his subject photographically in a much more interesting way. It becomes his own created photograph and you feel like you’re there in the in the photograph. (Lifson and Solomon-Godeau, 1981, pp. 107-108).⁷

Capa was revolutionary in showing a humanistic perspective to his pictures. He achieved this through photographs of men in combat as well as images of uprooted refugees. He believed that the assaults of war were brutally anonymous and impersonal. This is very clear in the Bombardment photograph (Mifflin, 2010, p.259).⁸  It could be said that Capa intended that his photographs and their dissemination through respected journals to raise anti-war sentiment by exposing its costs in the form of individual suffering.  He sought to re-personalise wars and to drive home the futility of war. Capa’s body of work amounting to 70,000 negatives continues to do just that. 

Capa’s photographs go beyond the mere snap in time.  They have an artistic quality, and the portraits in particular show layers emotions – despair, loneliness, fear, anxiety, hopelessness, weariness, and pathos but there are also hints of resilience, survival, dignity, perseverance, determination and some hope.  These complexities and qualities reflect the man and artist.  

Bibliography

Bear, J. (2010) ‘Magnum orbis: photographs from the end(s) of the earth’, Visual Studies, 25, 2 p. 111-123.   DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2010.502668. (Accessed: 7 April 2014).

http://www.biography.com/people/robert-capa-9237294#awesm=~oBleXBSRabIygc (Accessed 8 April 2014).

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.Biography_VPage&AID=2K7O3R14TSPQ. (Accessed 8 April 2014).

Lifson, B. and Solomon-Godeau, A (1981), ‘A conversation about the Photography scene’, Art World Follies, 16, pp. 107-108. Jstor [Online]. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/778377 (Accessed 27 March 2014).

Mifflin, J. (2010) ‘The story they tell: On archives and the latent voice in documentary photograph collections’, The American Archivist, 73 (1), pp. 250-262. JSTOR [Online]. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/27802724 (Accessed 10 April 2014).

O’Rawe, D. (2006), ‘Magnum Moments’, Fortnight 446, pp.18-19. JSTOR [Online]. (Accessed: 27 March 2014).

Whelan, R. (2004) Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection. New York: Phaidon Press.

Whelan, R. (2000) Robert Capa and the Spanish Civil War, Courage, loyalty and empathy. Available at: http://www.freedomforum.org/publications/msj/courage.summer2000/.  (Accessed 10 April 2014).

Endnotes

^1.        Whelan, R. (2004) Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection. New York: Phaidon Press.

^2.        Mifflin, J. (2010) ‘The story they tell: On archives and the latent voice in documentary photograph collections’, The American Archivist, 73 (1), p. 258. JSTOR [Online]. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/27802724 (Accessed 10 April 2014).

^3.        http://museum.icp.org/museum/collections/special/chim//bio/caparobe.html?q=chim/bio/caparobe.html.  (Accessed: 8 April 2014).    

^4.        Mifflin, J. (2010) ‘The story they tell: On archives and the latent voice in documentary photograph collections’, The American Archivist, 73 (1), p. 258. JSTOR [Online]. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/27802724 (Accessed 10 April 2014).

^5.        http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.Biography_VPage&AID=2K7O3R14TSPQ (Accessed 8 April 2014).

^6.        Miflin.J, (2010), p.251.

^7.        Lifson, B. and Solomon-Godeau, A (1981), ‘A conversation about the Photography scene’, Art World Follies, 16, pp. 107-108. Jstor [Online]. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/778377 (Accessed 27 March 2014).

^8.        Mifflin. J, (2010), p.259.