Robert Capa
"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough"
Robert Capa, the legendary Hungarian-born photojournalist held his camera only inches from the faces of the grief-stricken and the grievously wounded combatants and civilians. In unique detail, he captured the human drama, the raw and emotional manifestations of hardship and struggle of people caught in the midst of conflict.
Born André Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, Capa entered a world in conflict, between nations and between his parents. At young age, he suffered hunger, discrimination and political persecution for being a Jew and found solace and solidarity among leftist revolutionaries.
He was barely 18 when he moved to Berlin and took up photojournalism. His first big break came in 1932, when he was assigned to photograph Trotsky as he spoke in a Copenhagen stadium on the meaning of the Russian Revolution. Taken within a meter of so of Trotsky, his pictures etched an intense and intimate image of one of the figureheads in Russian revolution, thus it became Capa’s trademarks.
In 1936, he became known across the globe for a photo he took on the Cordoba Front of a Loyalist Militiaman who had just been shot and was in the act of falling to his death. The loyalist soldier was not a ruthless warmonger but an ordinary man or woman who had been forced to defend what he loves. The falling soldier became the iconic war, and anti-war image of the 20^th century. Capa believed that in war you must have a position or you cannot stant what goes on. Thus, the photo of the “falling soldier” represent his political bias and idealism.
As Nazi power grew in Germany, Friedmann moved to Paris, the only city he would ever consider home. In France, he documented the social and industrial strife of the mid-1930s, struggled to earn a living and fell in love with Gerda Taro. Together they invented Robert Capa, a rich, famous, talented American photographer. They moved on to war-torn Spain, determined to fight totalitarianism with cameras. Taro was killed in a road accident and part of Capa died with her. Still, he pursued his calling, traveling to China in 1938 to cover the Sino-Japanese war, back to Spain as the Republican cause was collapsing and then, as World War II raged, on to North Africa, Sicily, the Italian mainland and — most traumatically — to Omaha Beach and the slaughter of the D-Day invasion.
After more than a decade of front-line reporting, in collaboration with David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson, they set up in 1947 the Magnum photo cooperative.
On May 25, the last morning of his life, he set out from the village of Nam Dinh, in Vietnam's Red River delta, and exclaimed: "this is going to be a beautiful story.” Eight hours — and 30 km — later, Capa was dead, killed by a landmine at Thai Binh, as he tried to get just that little bit closer.