Robert Capa (real name: Endre Ernő Friedmann, October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II throughout Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Normandy landings at Omaha Beach, and the liberation of Paris.
His action photographs, such as those taken during the Normandy invasion in 1944, portray the violence of war in a unique and powerful way. In 1947, Capa was a co-founder of Magnum Photos, together with, among others, the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. This organization became the first cooperative agency for independent photographers on a global scale.
Career
He was born as Endre Friedmann to Dezső and Júlia Friedmann on October 22, 1913, in Budapest, Hungary. Concluding that he would have no promising future under the Hungarian regime, he left his homeland at the age of 18.
Capa initially aspired to become a writer; however, he found work as a photographer in Berlin and gradually came to love the medium. In 1933, he moved from Germany to France because of the rise of Nazism, but it was difficult for him to find work there as a freelance journalist. Around that time, he adopted the name “Robert Capa”—in fact, capa (“shark”) had been his school nickname—and he also thought the name would be more recognizable to American audiences, as it resembled that of the film director Frank Capra.
It became easier for him to sell his photographs under the newly adopted American name, and after some time he fully embraced the persona of Robert Capa (with the help of his girlfriend at the time, who acted as an intermediary between him and those interested in the photographs taken by the “great American photographer, Robert Capa”). Capa’s first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky delivering a speech in Copenhagen in 1932 on “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution.”
Spanish Civil War and Chinese Resistance to Japan
From 1936 to 1939, he was in Spain, photographing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War together with Gerda Taro—his partner and professional collaborator—and David Seymour. In 1938, he traveled to the Chinese city of Hankow (today known as Wuhan) to document the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion.
In 1936, he became known worldwide for a photograph (widely known as “The Falling Soldier”), which for a long time was mistakenly believed to have been taken at Cerro Muriano, on the Córdoba front, depicting a militiaman of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) who had just been shot and was captured in the instant of falling to his death. For many years, there was intense controversy regarding the authenticity of this photograph. A Spanish historian identified the dead soldier as Federico Borrell García from Alcoy (Alicante), though this identification was disputed. In 2003, the Spanish newspaper El Periódico claimed that the photograph had been taken near the town of Espejo, 10 km from Cerro Muriano, and that it was staged. In 2009, a Spanish professor published a book titled Shadows of Photography, in which he argued that the photograph could not have been taken at the place, time, or in the manner claimed by Capa and his supporters.
Many of Capa’s photographs from the Spanish Civil War were considered lost for decades, but resurfaced in Mexico City in the late 1990s. As he was leaving Europe in 1939, Capa lost the collection, which years later came to be known as “The Mexican Suitcase.” Ownership of the collection was transferred to the Capa Foundation, and in December 2007 it was moved to the International Center of Photography, a museum founded by Capa’s younger brother, Cornell, in Manhattan.
Photography
