A tailor's son in Budapest
Robert Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest on October 22, 1913, to a middle-class Jewish family. His parents, Dezső Friedmann and Júlia Berkovits, ran a fashion salon; his mother was the business's driving force, and his father worked as a tailor in her shop. He had an older brother, László, and a younger brother, Cornell, who would also become a photographer.
As a teenager Endre was drawn to a circle of socialist and avant-garde artists and took part in demonstrations against Hungary's authoritarian government. In 1931 the secret police arrested and beat him. A police official's wife who knew his family secured his release on condition that he leave Hungary at once. He was 17.
Berlin, Paris and a new name
In Berlin he studied political science and worked as a darkroom assistant and photographer for the agency Dephot. His first published photograph, in 1932, showed Leon Trotsky speaking in Copenhagen. When the Nazis took power in 1933 and began barring Jews from universities, he left for Paris.
There he met Gerta Pohorylle, a German Jewish refugee. He taught her photography, and together they invented a glamorous American photographer called Robert Capa, under whose name they sold their pictures. She soon took a professional name of her own, Gerda Taro, and became a remarkable photographer in her own right, while Friedmann kept the name Capa for the rest of his life. In Paris he shared a darkroom with Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour, known as Chim, friendships that would later become Magnum Photos.
Spain and China
From 1936 to 1939 Capa, Taro and Chim photographed the Spanish Civil War. Capa's most famous image from Spain, known as The Falling Soldier, appeared to show a Republican militiaman at the moment of death and was published in Life and other magazines. In 1938 the British magazine Picture Post called the 25-year-old Capa the greatest war photographer in the world. Researchers later questioned whether The Falling Soldier was staged; the debate has never been fully settled.
Capa also worked alongside Ernest Hemingway in Spain, and Life published an article on the writer's time there illustrated with Capa's photographs. His pictures put the human cost of the war in front of readers in France, Britain and the United States, years before most of them would see war at home.
In 1937 Gerda Taro was killed near Brunete when a tank crashed into the vehicle she was riding on. Capa was devastated and never married. In 1938 he traveled to China to photograph resistance to the Japanese invasion, and Life published his pictures. In 2007 three boxes of negatives by Capa, Taro and Chim from Spain, lost since 1939, were found in Mexico City. Known as the Mexican Suitcase, the roughly 4,500 negatives are now an important record of the war.
The Second World War
Capa moved to New York in 1939, and during the war worked as a correspondent for Collier's and then Life, covering North Africa and Italy. Because he was a Hungarian citizen he was technically an enemy alien, yet he was accredited to photograph alongside Allied troops. On October 7, 1943, in Naples, he photographed the aftermath of a bomb in the city's post office.
On June 6, 1944, he waded ashore on Omaha Beach in Normandy with the 1st Infantry Division, the only civilian photographer among the first-day assault on that beach. Under fire he took the pictures that became known as the Magnificent Eleven, blurred and grainy images of soldiers in the surf. Life published them on June 19, 1944, and they remain the most famous photographs of D-Day. Capa went on to photograph the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, and, in Leipzig in April 1945, the death of an American soldier by sniper fire, published by Life as the picture of the last man to die.
Founding Magnum
In 1947 Capa turned an idea he had nursed for years into reality. With Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David Seymour and William Vandivert, with Rita Vandivert and Maria Eisner, he founded Magnum Photos in Paris. It was a cooperative owned by the photographers themselves. The crucial principle was that copyright would stay with the photographers rather than the magazines that printed their work, so they could choose their own stories and sell them to many publications. The founders loosely divided the world: Chim took Europe, Cartier-Bresson India and the Far East, Rodger Africa and the Middle East, and Capa was free to follow events.
Magnum changed photojournalism. Its photographers went on to document Gandhi's India, the Algerian war of independence, the Vietnam War, revolutions in Latin America and the Middle East, and the lives of ordinary people across every continent. Cartier-Bresson wrote that Magnum existed to oblige its members to bear testimony on their world and their contemporaries. Today the agency's archive, licensed worldwide, is one of the great visual records of the last 80 years, and nearly 200,000 original Magnum press prints are preserved at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. Capa served as Magnum's president from 1952 until his death.
How Magnum works
Magnum is owned by its photographers, who act as its shareholders and vote on its direction at an annual meeting held in turn in New York, Paris and London. In Magnum's early years membership came by Capa's personal invitation. From 1955 a three-stage system took over: a photographer is first invited as a nominee, may later become an associate and, after presenting new portfolios to the members, can be elected a full member for life. The cooperative has offices in Paris, New York and London, and its photographers keep all the copyrights to their pictures.
That structure was Capa's real innovation. It gave photographers the independence to spend months or years on a story no magazine had asked for, from family life and religion to poverty, famine and war, and it made Magnum one of the first photographic cooperatives in the world. Many of the most widely reproduced images of the past eight decades, the ones in history textbooks, museums and newspapers, came out of that freedom.
After the war
In 1947 General Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom for his work recording the war. That year he traveled through the Soviet Union with the writer John Steinbeck, whom he had first met in 1943 when they shared a hotel room in Algiers with other war correspondents, photographing Moscow, Kyiv, Georgia and the ruins of Stalingrad for A Russian Journal, one of the few Western views of ordinary Soviet life at the start of the Cold War. From 1948 to 1950 he photographed the turbulent birth of the State of Israel, pictures that appeared in Irwin Shaw's Report on Israel. In 1953 he coined the term Generation X for a photo essay on young people who came of age after the war.
In 1954 Life asked him to cover the French war in Indochina. On May 25, 1954, in Thái Bình Province, Capa left his jeep to photograph a French advance and stepped on a landmine. He was killed at the age of 40. The French army awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Palm.
Jewish background
Capa was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, as both Magnum Photos and Wikipedia record. Antisemitism shaped his path: he left Berlin for Paris in 1933 because, as a Jew, he faced Nazi persecution, and his partner Gerda Taro was a German Jewish refugee. His photographs of the young State of Israel in 1948 were among the most widely seen images of its founding. He was not religious; his commitment was to bearing witness.
Legacy
Capa changed how the world sees war. Instead of distant views of battlefields, his small 35-millimeter camera brought readers into the trenches and onto the beaches, close to the fear and suffering of soldiers and civilians. Historians credit him with redefining war photojournalism: the pictures came from inside the fighting rather than from a safe distance. In 1955 the Overseas Press Club created the Robert Capa Gold Medal, still awarded each year for photographic reporting that requires exceptional courage. His brother Cornell founded the International Fund for Concerned Photography and, in 1974, the International Center of Photography in New York, partly to preserve Robert's work.
Exhibitions of his work continue to draw large audiences. The International Center of Photography's traveling show This Is War: Robert Capa at Work, built from his prints, contact sheets, captions and magazine layouts, was shown at the Barbican in London, in Milan, Barcelona and Rotterdam in 2009 and 2010. He was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in 1976, and in 2013, the centenary of his birth, Hungary issued a postage stamp and a gold coin in his honor. A 2011 documentary, The Mexican Suitcase, told the story of his rediscovered Spanish negatives.
Most of all, Capa left Magnum. Long after his death, the cooperative he imagined has allowed independent photographers to show the world famines, wars, revolutions and everyday life on their own terms. Anyone who has learned about the 20th century from a photograph has probably, at some point, seen the world through the eyes of a Magnum photographer, and through the vision of the man who insisted on getting close.
Sources & further reading
Robert Capa, Magnum Photos · History, Magnum Photos · Robert Capa, International Center of Photography · Robert Capa, Wikipedia · Magnum Photos, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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