In 1932, when Robert Capa’s career began, photographers were viewed as documentarians. Their names were often omitted from magazines, captions under their pictures were riddled with typos, and negatives and prints were frequently lost. Four years later, that changed.
In 1936, Capa went to Spain to capture the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Hungarian by birth, his short stature and dark complexion allowed him to blend in among the Southern troops. He used a handheld camera to shoot the action from chillingly close proximity. When the photographs were published in the U.K. magazine Picture Post, the editor summarized: “We present these pictures as simply the finest pictures of front-line action ever taken.” Capa didn’t invent photojournalism, but he ushered it into the modern era.
Violence wasn’t foreign to Capa. He was born to a Jewish family in Budapest in 1913, just a year before a brutal World War began, and his name was Endre Ernö Friedmann. At 17, he was beaten by a policeman during a protest in 1930; a year later he fled the Hungarian capital for Berlin with a single salami in his pocket.
But Berlin wasn’t much better. Hitler was colonizing Munich’s beer halls and poisoning minds. When the Nazi Party took power, in 1933, the 20-year-old photographer left for Paris, where he shared a darkroom with two rising stars—Henri Cartier-Bresson and David “Chim” Seymour. In cahoots with his fellow photographer and fiancée, Gerda Taro, he renamed himself “Robert Capa,” borrowing from his childhood nickname “Cápa,” Hungarian for “shark.”
Taro died in 1937, covering the Battle of Brunete, yet despite the tragedy, Capa didn’t stop dancing with death. Come 1944, he made history by photographing the D-day landings on Omaha Beach. Then, in 1947, along with Seymour, Cartier-Bresson, and George Rodger, he co-founded Magnum Photos, the first cooperative owned and administered by its photographer members. Months later, Capa set sail again, this time for the Soviet Union with the writer John Steinbeck, to shoot the ruins in Stalingrad, Moscow, Kyiv, and Georgia. In 1948, he traveled to Israel to document the country’s founding.
Death caught up with Capa in 1954, when he stepped on a land mine during the First Indochina War. This book, Robert Capa in the Making, by Le Monde journalist Michel Lefebvre, traces the major 20th-century events he chronicled. And it includes previously unpublished works from private collections.
“The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands,” Capa once said, “and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
