Robert Capa was the archetypal photojournalist: courageous, hard-drinking, crusading and heroic. His life was a series of gambles, whether it be at the poker tables of blitzed London or the blood-sodden beaches of Normandy, the race-course at Longchamps or the devastated villages of Spain. A notorious womaniser, his good looks and easy charm enabled him to escape the very situations which they invariably led him into. And more than this, Capa made some of the most iconic photographs of our century, the photographs which have become the memories of those of us fortunate not to have been there.
Our man was born Endre Friedmann on 22 October 1913, in Budapest. With Hungary under the proto-fascist and anti-semitic dictatorship of Admiral Horthy, the young Jewish Friedmann contacted the local Communist Party recruiter and although both men soon realised their mutual disinterest, it was not before Friedmann was observed by the secret police. After being arrested, he was later freed on condition that he left the country. A political exile at seventeen, he was never again to have a real home.
Moving first to Berlin to study journalism, he got a job as a darkroom assistant and errand boy for the Degephot photo agency when his parents ran into financial difficulties. Simon Guttman, the owner of the agency, recognised his young worker's eye for a good picture and soon lent him a small Leica camera with which to cover simple assignments. It was just after his nineteenth birthday, in November 1932, that Friedmann was entrusted with an assignment forDer Welt Spiegel to photograph Trotsky, who was to address a rally in Copenhagen on the meaning of the Russian Revolution; to his delight, his photographs were given a full page. His good fortune was not to continue, however. The following year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, and in the increasingly anti-semitic environment, Friedmann thought it prudent to leave. He became exiled once more.
It was as an émigré in Paris that Friedmann met three people who were to change his life: photographer and radical intellectual Henri Cartier-Bresson, a young Polish photographer David Szymin who was known as 'Chim', and Gerda Taro, a photographer and German refugee. All three were working with the Alliance photo agency, founded by another German exile Maria Eisner; it was Taro, with whom Friedmann (now Andre) had fallen in love, that got him work there. It was during this period that the foundation for the 'Capa' legend was laid. Taro and Friedmann thought that his pictures would command bigger fees if they were taken by a successful American photographer rather than an impoverished young emigre,so they simply invented one, Robert Capa. It is said that he was exposed only after Lucien Vogel, editor of Vu magazine, was offered 'Capa' photographs which he had witnessed being taken by Friedmann. And so Andre Friedmann made his name Robert Capa. However, it was in Spain, and not Paris, that he was really to make his name.
The Spanish Civil War, the result of General Franco's insurrection on 17 July 1936, quickly became a symbol of the fight against the cloud of Fascism that was darkening all Europe. Capa received an assignment from Vu and, with Taro, immediately left for the front. With his Leica, and more light-sensitive film, Capa was able to make photographs of war which possessed an immediacy that had not previously been seen. He later remarked: 'The refugees on the road are in the hands of fate, with their lives at stake.' As a refugee himself, separated from both the country, and name, of his birth he understood this only too well.
It was on 5 September 1936, on the front-line near the village of Cerro Muriano, that Capa was to take his most famous photograph -a Republican militiaman at the moment of death. The image was included in Vu later that month, weeks before Capa's twenty-third birthday. However, their has been much speculation over the authenticity of the photograph, particularly over recent decades. Questions were raised about Capa's position in relation to the soldier, why his camera was focussed at that point, and why there is no sign of a wound (the man is wearing a head-scarf, the knot of which is often assumed to be a bullet wound). To make matters worse, there are no contact sheets which record the sequence of events and even these negatives have been lost, including that of the famous photograph itself. Capa failed to dispel reservations during his lifetime, and his account contradicts others given by friends at the time.
It is only in the past few years that strong evidence has emerged to support the validity of the Capa's claims. Through the efforts of Richard Bano, a young Spanish historian, and Mario Brotons, himself a militiaman in 1936, the pictured man has been identified as Federico Borrell Garcia, a twenty-four year old man from Alcoy, near Alicante. Spanish government records have revealed that he was the only member of the Alcoy militia to have been killed at Cerro Muriano on that date. But if war can sometimes bring celebrity, it always brings tragedy. In July 1937, while covering the Republican offensive west of Madrid, the car in which Gerda Taro was travelling was hit by an out-of-control tank and she was crushed beneath its tracks. She died the next day; Capa was devastated. None of the many women which followed, and there were many, would have quite the same effect on him.
In 1938, Picture Post published eight of Capa's photographs from the Spanish Civil War and proclaimed him 'The Greatest War Photographer in the World'. And yet despite this, it was not until 1943 that he was sent to cover fighting in the Second World War. After postings in North Africa and Italy, where he met English photographer George Rodger, it was off the French coast on D-Day, 6 June 1944, that Capa made his most celebrated work of the period. With characteristic bravery, Capa went ashore with the first wave of American troops as they fought their way onto this bloodiest of Normandy beaches. There were more than 2000 casualties and Capa described how 'the bullets tore holes in the water around me'. More than one hundred photographs of the battle were taken, at great personal risk, before Capa returned by landing craft to the fleet offshore; of these only a handful survive. Life magazine, for whom he was working, first told Capa that the films had been damaged by sea water entering his cameras so when he heard the truth, that an over-eager darkroom assistant in London had attempted to hasten the films' drying and had melted the negatives, he was doubly furious. However it is a measure of his generous spirit, perhaps strengthened by memories of his own start in photography, that he told the editors that he would never work for Life again if they fired the assistant responsible for the accident.
Stories of Capa's compassion and charm are as plentiful as those outlining his bravery. Before his D-Day landing he moved into a suite at the Dorchester with the beautiful wife of an RAF pilot (he had been asked to leave the hotel a couple of years earlier, during the Blitz, when the management grew weary of the procession of young women that made their way to his room). There were celebrity parties - Hemingway fractured his skull while driving home from one during a blackout - and many pokergames, which were not to be disrupted, no matter how close the Luftwaffe's strikes. His gambling was certainly not going to make Capa rich, although for a man who regularly gambled his life this was a small matter - 'Je ne suis pas heureux', unlucky.
Many wished that their luck could be as bad as Capa's. Back in Paris after the Liberation, Capa and his friend, the writer Irwin Shaw, came across Ingrid Bergman in the lobby of the Ritz. They invited her to dinner and, to their surprise, she accepted. Within weeks Capa and Bergman were to begin a passionate affair that was to last two years. She returned to Hollywood, and to her husband, in 1946 to begin work on Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious and Capa promised to seek her out - his photograph of her on set is included in this exhibition. He stayed in Hollywood for several months writing a script based on his war memoirs, and although this film was never made, his presence on set is said to have inspired aspects of Hitchcock's masterpiece, Rear Window (although it is certain that in reality, Capa would have enjoyed the fashionable world which James Stewart's character so despised). Soon after he moved to New York and his relationship with Bergman ended amicably. Her daughter Isabella Rossellini later remarked to Bergman that it was incredible that she had such a lover.
While Capa made an enormous contribution to photography through his own pictures, some argue that his greatest single contribution was the establishing of Magnum Photos Inc. with three of his photographer friends, Cartier-Bresson, 'Chim' and Rodger. Having lost negatives of some of his most famous pictures, Capa was to make sure that this would not happen again. He developed the then radical concept that the photographer retain both the negative and the copyright of any photograph which they took, a policy of photographic rights which revolutionised the industry and which Magnum defends fiercely to this day.
Capa's extraordinary lifestyle continued, his photographs as likely to contain Matisse, Picasso or Bogart as they were immigrants or soldiers. He continued to work hard at Magnum, although in Capa's presence its name was as likely to be associated with bottles of Champagne as it was with guns or greatness. His passion for women and war continued, often simultaneously. During a sudden resumption in fighting during the establishment of the state of Israel, aerial flares lit up the sky, fully illuminating the hillside upon which Capa and a barely-uniformed young women were energetically making love. It could have been his last time. Days later, while covering fighting on the main beach of Tel Aviv, Capa felt a sharp pain between his legs. Although only a graze on his inner thigh, for one dreadful moment he thought he had lost his genitals; 'They got too close this time', he said and he promised never again to photograph war. It was a promise which tragically he failed to keep.
After spells in Europe and Japan and in need of money and perhaps a little excitement, Capa agreed to replaceLife magazine's photographer and cover the French Indochina war for one month. The French colonists had suffered major losses to the communist Vietminh only days before Capa arrived in the country. He began work on a story about the military situation in the Red Riverdelta, where the activities of the Vietminh were increasing. On 25 May 1954, he accompanied a French mission to evacuate and raze two small forts between Namdinh and Thaibnh. Often under attack from snipers and shelling, the mission was also halted by a number of ambushes. During one such halt, Capa followed a platoon into a field beside the road in order to photograph them. He made two exposures. They were to be his last. Moments later he stepped on a landmine. His camera was clutched in one hand. Je ne suis pas heureux.
When his body was returned to the United States, it was suggested that he be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, although his mother strongly objected that he be laid to rest amongst military men. Instead, a small private burial was held in the Quaker cemetery at Amawalk, New York state. The service was attended by immediate family and a few members of Magnum; one of the wreaths was from a bartender in Hanoi whom Capa had taught how to mix the perfect Martini.
Jeremy Millar, Programme Organiser
For further information on this and past exhibitions, visit our Archive and Study Room.
