- Person
- Robert Capa
- Lived
- 1913–1954
- Field
- War photography, photojournalism
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1913. He left Hungary as a teenager, left Berlin for Paris when the Nazis took power, and by the late 1930s was famous for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 Picture Post called him the greatest war photographer in the world.
During the Second World War Capa photographed for Collier's and then Life in North Africa and Italy. As a Hungarian citizen he was technically an enemy alien, yet he was accredited to work with Allied troops. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he was attached to the 16th Infantry Regiment of the US 1st Infantry Division and waded ashore at Omaha Beach in Normandy, where American troops met some of the fiercest German resistance of the day.
Under fire, in the surf, Capa took a small number of photographs. Eleven survived, and Life published them on June 19, 1944. Grainy and blurred, they show soldiers struggling through the water among the steel obstacles, and they gave millions of readers their first real sense of what the landing was like for the men who made it. The images, known as the Magnificent Eleven, are among the most reproduced war photographs ever taken.
Some of the story around them has since been corrected. Capa long said that a darkroom accident in London had ruined most of his film; later research, and Life's own picture editor John Morris, suggested he probably shot only about eleven frames. Captions written in 1944 also misidentified some of the men pictured. None of this changes what the photographs show.
Capa went on to photograph the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge, and in 1947 General Eisenhower awarded him the Medal of Freedom for his work recording the war. His working rule, quoted by Magnum Photos, was that if your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough.
Why it matters
Capa's D-Day photographs remain the defining images of the Normandy landings, used in museums, textbooks and memorials to show new generations the cost of the liberation of Europe.
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
- Robert Capa Wikipedia
- Robert Capa Magnum Photos
- Robert Capa International Center of Photography
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