Robert Capa

‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.’

It would eventually be his belief in this that lead Robert Capa to his death in Vietnam in May 1954 when he stepped on a landmine whilst trying to take a photograph of French soldiers retreating.

The life of the man whom most people believe to be the greatest war photographer ever was cut tragically short on that day in 1954, but the thousands of negatives he left behind help him to live on in our memories.

Robert Capa was a photographer in a different mould to contemporary photographers in that he never made a secret of his political views, and throughout his life these views often got him into trouble. 

‘In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot go on’.

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Endre Friedmann was born in Hungary in October 1913, but was forced to leave his country and family behind when he was arrested at a demonstration. He went to Berlin, which was where he started working in photography until the rise of Nazism in 1933 forced him to flee to France.

Freelance work was hard to come by in France, so Friedmann and his girlfrend, Gerta Pohorylle came up with an elaborate plan to make some money. Gerta was working as a journalist, and she came up with the idea of claiming that Friedmann’s photographs were by an American with the flash, attractive sounding name of Robert Capa. The photographs sold, and  Friedmann became the great American photographer who the world would come to know as Robert Capa.

In 1936, Capa, together with Gerta (who had changed her name to Gerda Taro by this point) and David Seymour went to Spain to cover the brutal civil war that was in process there. Capa was very much pro-loyalist, and spent his time photographing the soldiers and civilians in an effort to try and understand what was going on. Although he was a war photographer, Capa’s images, in contrast to those of James Nachtwey for example, weren’t about suffering, atrocities and death. He tried to capture a more social aspect of war, and this is one of the reasons why I admire his photography so much. Capa didn’t go for the shock factor that today’s photojournalists exhibit. His images were more about keeping his subjects human, and showing how they were coping with what was happening around them. 

Susie Linfield, in ‘The Cruel Radiance” , has this to say:

“Sometimes, when I am feeling sad, I look at a photograph of Robert Capa’s that I especially like. You could call it a war photograph, though it shows two men dancing instead of two men fighting. They wear overalls and white shirts; they are almost certainly peasants or workers, and poor. The one who faces us has a black beret and a moustache and a smile, and he flings his arms wide as he dances. In a semicircle behind the dancing couple stand seven other men, their faces lit with pleasure as they watch. The photograph radiates an ebullient generosity, and it does what every good news photograph should do: draws us in and, simultaneously, makes us want to go outside the frame to learn more about these men and their lives and the cause for which they fought.” (Linfield, S, The Cruel Radiance- Photography and Political Violence, p.175, The University of Chicago Press, 2010)

His images were not formally composed in the way that James Nachtwey’s are, and often they are very blurry and grainy in true photojournalism style, but Capa was also not afraid to get in amongst the action What are probably his most famous images are very much in this style, but that can be forgiven given the circumstances they were taken under. Capa took part in the Allied invasion of Omaha Beach in 1944, and, with machine gun bullets pinging around his ears, he managed to document the event. Capa took over a hundred images of the storming of Omaha Beach, but due to an accident in the photo lab, all but 11 were destroyed. These eleven images have come to be known as The Magnificent Eleven. 

Perhaps Capa’s most famous image of all was also taken up close to the action. The Falling Soldier depicts a soldier in the Spanish civil war as he is hit by a bullet and falling over backwards dead, rifle in hand. (The authenticity of this image has been cast into doubt, with scholars arguing that it wasn’t taken where Capa claimed to have taken it, and was in fact part of a training exercise where the soldier is simply falling over. Other scholars doubt that it was even taken by Capa, claiming that Gerda Taro made this iconic image. This isn’t the place to discuss this futher, but you can find plenty about it on the internet.)

While in Spain, Capa and Taro were willing to die for the cause, (and indeed, Taro did die when she hit by a tank).  Yet despite this, as Linfield claims, Capa “…..had never wanted to be a war photographer per se. For Capa, it was imperative that war be documented, witnessed, and exposed, especially as it became the main fact of life and of death for millions of people between 1936 and 1945”.  (Linfield, S, The Cruel Radiance- Photography and Political Violence, p.185, The University of Chicago Press, 2010). 

Linfield goes on to say that Capa was most interested in the lives people lived and the societies they built. Capa had the ability to inject mundane scenes with symbolic importance. His images are fascinating in that they show so much about how people cope in times of war and destruction. They don’t only show the destruction, but also how life is continuing around it. It seems to me that modern war photographers focus on one image to shock the viewer, not on what else is happening. This isn’t a bad thing, as that’s their job; to bring the atrocities to the attention of the world, and a shocking, graphic image is a very effective way of doing  that. 

When you look at the faces of Capa’s subjects, you can see the emotions there. You can see sorrow, but also determinism and many other emotions that set his images apart from others. Sure, it’s easy for us to say that now as we have the benefit of hindsight, but take some of the images made in Spain, and the later ones Capa made in Israel, and it’s especially true. Even without the benefit of hindsight, you can see the haunted looks on people’s faces.

Sometime around 1950, Capa decided he’d had enough of photographing wars, and put more and more time into his role with Magnum Photos, which he’d helped found with Henri Cartier-Bresson and others, and it was while on assignment for Magnum in Japan that Life magazine asked him to go to Southeast Asia to document the war which the French had been fighting for a number of years. Despite knowing that he should never leave the main column and the protection of the soldiers, Capa saw the opportunity for an image that he believed could only be captured from one position. He went on ahead, but stepped on a landmine. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

His life was cut tragically short, but thanks to his determinism and  belief in trying to show the rest of the world the effect that wars have on societies, we can still have an insight into those times.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Capa

ROBERT CAPA ‘In Love and War’ (PBS Documentary) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkDpxuKXFpQ

Linfield, S, The Cruel Radiance- Photography and Political Violence, The University of Chicago Press, 2010

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535353

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