Robert Capa

Robert Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann on October 22, 1913, in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary. His parents, Dezső and Júlia Friedmann, ran a fashionable dressmaking salon in the city, and the family belonged to Budapest's large, assimilated Jewish middle class ^[1]. The Hungary of his youth was politically turbulent: a brief communist republic in 1919 was followed by the authoritarian regency of Miklós Horthy, whose regime introduced some of Europe's earliest antisemitic quota laws.

As a teenager Friedmann drifted toward the political left. At seventeen he was detained by the Hungarian secret police after attending a demonstration, and in 1931 he left the country, a departure that was part exile and part escape ^[1]. He settled first in Berlin, where he enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik to study journalism while working as a darkroom assistant at Dephot, a pioneering photo agency run by Simon Guttmann ^[2].

Dephot gave him his first real assignment. In 1932 the agency sent the untested young Hungarian to Copenhagen to photograph the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky addressing Danish students. Cameras were barred from the hall, so Friedmann smuggled in a small Leica and worked at close range in poor light. The grainy, urgent pictures that resulted were published across a full page and announced a talent for proximity that would define his career ^[2]. Hitler's rise in January 1933 made Berlin impossible for a Jewish leftist, and Friedmann moved on, eventually reaching Paris in the autumn of 1933.

Paris in the mid-1930s was crowded with refugee photographers, and Friedmann struggled to sell his work. The solution he found in 1934 and 1935 was one of the stranger episodes in the history of the press. With Gerda Taro (born Gerta Pohorylle), a German Jewish refugee who became his partner in work and in life, he invented a fictitious American photographer named Robert Capa, supposedly rich, famous, and able to command triple the usual picture rates. Editors bought the images; the invention soon leaked, and Friedmann simply became Capa in fact as well as name ^[1]. Taro took her own pseudonym at the same moment and built an independent career.

The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936, made the new name famous. Capa and Taro crossed into Spain within weeks to cover the Republican side for the French leftist press, including the magazine Vu ^[3]. On September 5, 1936, near Cerro Muriano on the Córdoba front, Capa exposed the frame that became known as The Falling Soldier, showing a Republican militiaman apparently at the instant of being shot. Published in Vu that September and in Life in July 1937, it became one of the most reproduced war photographs ever made, and also one of the most debated, as later researchers questioned where and how it was taken ^[3].

The war brought Capa fame and grief in equal measure. In July 1937 Taro was crushed by a Republican tank during the chaotic retreat from the Battle of Brunete and died at age 26, the first woman photographer known to have been killed covering combat at the front ^[4]. Capa never fully recovered from her death and never married. He kept working: his coverage of the Battle of Teruel and of refugees fleeing toward the French border in 1938 and 1939 was published widely, and in December 1938 the British magazine Picture Post introduced a spread of his Spanish work by calling him the greatest war photographer in the world ^[2].

Any list of Robert Capa achievements begins with the Second World War. In 1938 he spent months in China documenting the resistance to the Japanese invasion, including the aftermath of the Battle of Taierzhuang ^[2]. After the fall of France he emigrated to New York, and from 1941 he covered the Allied war effort for Collier's and then Life, photographing the North African campaign, the invasion of Sicily, and the brutal Italian fighting at Naples and Anzio. In October 1943, near Maiella, he parachuted with American troops despite never having trained as a jumper.

His most celebrated assignment came on June 6, 1944. Capa landed with the first waves of the US 1st Infantry Division on Omaha Beach in Normandy, working in chest-deep water under machine-gun fire. Only a small number of usable frames survived; Life published them on June 19, 1944, with a caption noting their slight blur, and the surviving images, later called the Magnificent Eleven, became the defining photographic record of D-Day ^[5]. The long-standing story that a darkroom accident in London melted most of his film has been challenged by recent researchers, but the surviving pictures' status is undisputed ^[5]. Capa went on to photograph the liberation of Paris in August 1944 and jumped with the 17th Airborne Division across the Rhine in March 1945.

His second great achievement was institutional. In 1947, together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour (Chim), George Rodger, and William Vandivert, Capa founded Magnum Photos, a cooperative agency owned by its photographers ^[6]. Magnum's central innovation, letting photographers keep their own copyrights and control how their pictures were used, shifted power away from magazines and remains the agency's foundation. Capa served as its restless organizer and later president of its New York office. That same year he traveled through the Soviet Union with the novelist John Steinbeck, a collaboration published in 1948 as A Russian Journal, and in 1947 he also published his own darkly comic war memoir, Slightly Out of Focus ^[1].

Capa cultivated the character he had invented: a gambler, a charmer, a fixture of press bars from Madrid to London who was famous for losing at poker and for an accent that mixed Hungarian, French, and American slang. Friends recalled a man who masked fear and grief with jokes; his memoir treats mortal danger as farce, a tone he maintained even as colleagues noted the toll the wars took on him ^[1].

Gerda Taro remained the central attachment of his life, and her death in 1937 closed off the possibility of marriage in his own telling. During the Second World War he had a serious relationship in London with Elaine Justin, whom he called Pinky, and after the war he had a widely reported romance with the actress Ingrid Bergman, whom he met in Paris in 1945. Bergman wrote about the relationship in her autobiography; Capa declined to follow her to Hollywood and give up war photography, and the affair ended by 1947 ^[1].

His identity crossed borders as much as his work did. Born a Hungarian citizen, he lost the protection of that nationality as a Jewish exile, spent the war years as an enemy alien with American papers pending, and became a naturalized United States citizen in 1946. He kept close ties to his mother Julia and his younger brother Cornell Capa, also a photographer, who had joined him in Paris in the 1930s and later worked for Life in New York ^[7].

After 1945 Capa announced, more than once, that he was a war photographer out of work and glad of it. He spent the late 1940s running Magnum's affairs, shooting stories on artists and film sets, and photographing friends such as Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. Between 1948 and 1950 he made three trips to the new state of Israel, covering the 1948 war and the arrival of immigrants, work that appeared in magazines and in the 1950 book Report on Israel with the writer Irwin Shaw ^[2].

The early 1950s were more difficult. In 1953 his United States passport was briefly withheld during the McCarthy era over allegations of past communist sympathies, an episode resolved only after he swore he had never been a party member ^[1]. Money was short, and Magnum's finances depended heavily on his energy.

In April 1954 he accepted a well-paid assignment from Life to replace a colleague covering the French war in Indochina. On May 25, 1954, while accompanying a French column near Thái Bình in the Red River Delta, Capa walked into a field to photograph advancing soldiers and stepped on a landmine. He died within minutes, camera in hand, at age 40, the first American correspondent killed in what would become the Vietnam conflict ^[8]. The French army awarded him the Croix de Guerre posthumously, and he was buried at the Quaker cemetery in Amawalk, New York.

Capa's influence rests on a simple working principle he stated himself: if your pictures are not good enough, you are not close enough. The line, quoted in nearly every Robert Capa biography, compressed an ethic of physical and emotional proximity that generations of photojournalists adopted as a professional creed ^[2]. His D-Day frames shaped the popular memory of the Normandy landings and directly influenced the handheld visual style of the film Saving Private Ryan.

Institutions preserve the work. In 1955 Life and the Overseas Press Club established the Robert Capa Gold Medal, still awarded annually for the best published photographic reporting requiring exceptional courage and enterprise ^[9]. His brother Cornell Capa founded the International Center of Photography in New York in 1974 in large part to house and study Robert's archive along with the work of other concerned photographers ^[7]. In 2007 the so-called Mexican Suitcase, three boxes containing about 4,500 lost Spanish Civil War negatives by Capa, Taro, and Chim, resurfaced in Mexico City and was transferred to the center, transforming scholarship on all three photographers ^[10].

The record is not without argument. The authenticity debate around The Falling Soldier and the revised accounts of the D-Day darkroom story have made Capa a case study in how photographic legends form. Yet among basic Robert Capa facts, the essentials are secure: he covered the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the First Indochina War, co-founded the agency that changed photographers' rights, and died doing the work he had tried repeatedly to quit ^[1].