AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- War photography, D-Day at Omaha Beach, co-founding Magnum Photos
- Worked in
- Black and white, and color from the early 1940s
- Camera
- 35mm Contax cameras
- Also
- Wrote the war memoir Slightly Out of Focus
- Start with
- Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection (Phaidon, 2004)
- Links
Robert Capa (1913–1954) was a Hungarian-born photographer and one of the founders of Magnum Photos. He photographed wars from Spain in 1936 to Indochina in 1954, and worked close to the people in them. In 1938 Picture Post called him “the greatest war photographer in the world.”
The story
On the morning of 6 June 1944, a landing craft carried Robert Capa toward Omaha Beach in Normandy. He was not a soldier. He was there for Life magazine, with two Contax cameras. He photographed men wading through the surf between steel obstacles. Then he took cover behind a tank. His hands were shaking so badly that he ruined a new roll of film before he could load it. “I threw myself flat and my lips touched the earth of France. I had no desire to kiss it,” he wrote later.
He had come a long way to that beach. Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, he studied in Berlin and moved to Paris in 1933, after the Nazis took power. There he met Gerda Taro. Together they invented a new name for him: Robert Capa, an American photographer.
From 1936 the two of them photographed the Spanish Civil War. His picture of a Loyalist militiaman falling, later known as The Falling Soldier, made him famous. Where and how it was taken has been debated for many years. In 1937 Taro was killed in Spain. Capa kept working, in Spain and then in China.
In London, most of his D-Day film was lost. Only about ten frames survived, grainy and blurred. Life published them on 19 June 1944. They became some of the best-known pictures of the war, and he later called his memoir Slightly Out of Focus.
In 1947 he founded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert. It was owned by the photographers themselves. Next he photographed the first years of the State of Israel, from 1948 to 1950. In 1954 Life asked him to cover the war in Indochina. On 25 May, in Thái Bình province, he stepped on a landmine and was killed. He was 40.
On that beach in Normandy, he had his face in the sand and his hands could hardly hold a camera. Still, he stayed close enough to see the faces in the water. That was his advice to every photographer: “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
The work
- 1913Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest
- 1932First published photograph: Leon Trotsky speaking in Copenhagen
- 1933Moves to Paris after the Nazis take power
- 1936Photographs the Spanish Civil War with Gerda Taro
- 1938Photographs in China; Picture Post calls him the greatest war photographer in the world
- 1944Lands at Omaha Beach on D-Day for Life
- 1947Co-founds Magnum Photos and publishes Slightly Out of Focus
- 1948Begins photographing the new State of Israel
- 1954Killed by a landmine in Thái Bình, Indochina
Lessons
Get close. Capa worked near the people he photographed, in the same water and the same danger. Distance shows up in the picture.
Imperfect can be true. His D-Day frames are blurred and grainy. The shake is part of what they tell us.
Build your own home for your work. With Magnum, photographers kept control of their own pictures. Find people you trust and work together.
Try this: photograph an event near you, like a market or a local game, with one normal lens. Do not zoom. Each time you want to raise the camera, take two steps closer first.
Gear
35mm Contax rangefinder: he carried two Contax cameras with 50mm lenses on D-Day, according to accounts of the landing.
Color film: he tried Kodachrome as early as 1938 and from the early 1940s often carried one camera for black and white and one for color.
Books
Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection (Phaidon, 2004). A large book of 572 pages with 937 photographs, chosen by his biographer Richard Whelan and his brother Cornell Capa from about 70,000 negatives. The pictures run in order from 1932 to 1954, grouped into stories with short texts. You find the wars in Spain, China and Europe, but also Picasso in France and quiet moments between the battles. It is the best single book if you want to see his whole working life.
Slightly Out of Focus (Modern Library, 2001). His own book about the Second World War, first published by Henry Holt in 1947. It follows him as a war correspondent through London, North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, told in words and pictures. This edition has a foreword by Cornell Capa and an introduction by Richard Whelan. The tone is often funny, and Capa admitted he let himself go a little beyond the facts. Read it for his voice, not as a history book.
The Mexican Suitcase (Steidl and ICP, 2010). Two hardcover volumes in a box, made for the exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. They show all 4,500 Spanish Civil War negatives by Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour (Chim). The negatives went missing from Capa’s Paris studio at the start of the Second World War and reached the ICP in 2007. Essays by Cynthia Young, Paul Preston, Brian Wallis, Kristen Lubben and others. A deep book for readers who want to see how the three worked, frame by frame.
Capa in Color (Delmonico Books/Prestel with ICP, 2014). The catalogue of the 2014 ICP exhibition curated by Cynthia Young, with an essay by Sally Stein. It brings together his color photographs from 1941 to 1954, most of them little known, together with the magazine pages where they first appeared. It shows a side of Capa that many people never see, beyond the black-and-white war pictures.
In his words
“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
Today I would like to talk about a photo taken by one of the most well known war photographer Robert Capa, the photo that is very famous and also little controversial. So let’s check out The Falling Soldier.