- Person
- Robert Capa
- Lived
- 1913–1954
- Field
- War photography, photojournalism
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
By the end of the Second World War, Robert Capa, a Budapest-born Jewish photographer, had covered the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of China and the war in Europe. He had seen how magazines owned the photographs they printed and decided which stories were told. He had a different idea.
In 1947, in Paris, Capa founded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, known as Chim, George Rodger and William Vandivert, together with Rita Vandivert and Maria Eisner. Magnum was a cooperative owned by its members. Its central principle, in Magnum's own words, was that copyright would be held by the authors of the imagery, not by the magazines that published the work. Photographers could sell their pictures to many publications and pursue stories no editor had assigned.
The founders loosely divided the world. Chim took Europe, Cartier-Bresson India and the Far East, Rodger Africa and the Middle East, and Capa followed events wherever they led. Capa served as Magnum's president from 1952 until he was killed by a landmine in Indochina in 1954 while photographing the French war there for Life.
Magnum went on to document much of the history of the following decades: Cartier-Bresson in India at the time of Gandhi's assassination, the Algerian war of independence, Philip Jones Griffiths's Vietnam Inc., Susan Meiselas in Nicaragua, Gilles Peress in Northern Ireland and Iran, and countless pictures of everyday life, poverty, faith and family. Cartier-Bresson wrote that Magnum was created to oblige its members to bear testimony on their world and their contemporaries.
Magnum is still owned by its photographers, with offices in Paris, New York and London, and nearly 200,000 original Magnum press prints are preserved at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Many of the images through which people around the world remember the 20th century came out of the independence Capa built into it.
Why it matters
Magnum's photographers still record wars, crises and daily life worldwide, and its archive gives the public, schools and historians a vast visual record of modern history.
About Robert Capa
Budapest-born war photographer who showed the world D-Day and five wars up close, and co-founded Magnum Photos, the cooperative that has documented history ever since.
More about Robert Capa
Sources
- History Magnum Photos
- Robert Capa Magnum Photos
- Magnum Photos Wikipedia
- Robert Capa Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.