Robert Capa

It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian. (Robert Capa) 

Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Segovia Front, Spain 1937

Robert Capa (1913-1946) was born as Endre Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary. Aged seventeen, because of his and Kati Horna's leftist student activities, Friedmann was arrested by the Hungarian secret police but released the following day on the condition that he leave Hungary after finishing the school year. In July of 1931, he moved to Berlin, where he enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a student of journalism. Only a couple of months later, he learned that because his parents' dressmaking business had been badly hurt by the worldwide economic depression, they could no longer send him money for tuition, room, and board.

Robert Capa, Retreat of the International Brigades, Montblanch, near Barcelona, October 1938

In 1932, a friend helped him obtain a job as darkroom assistant at Dephot, the first cooperative photojournalist agency. The agency's director, Simon Guttmann, was a friend of Walter Benjamin, and, since 1928, also was the employer of Otto Umbehr (Umbo). Guttmann, recognized Capa's talent and, in December, sent him to Copenhagen to photograph Leon Trotsky delivering a lecture to Danish university students. Capa smuggled his inconspicuous Leica into the stadium, positioned himself near to where Trotsky was speaking, and clandestinely snapped a series of photographs that captured the energy of the drama of the moment, so much so that Berlin’s Der Weltspiegel devoted a full page to Capa's photographs. It was his first published story.

Robert Capa, Leon Trotsky lecturing on the Russian revolution, Copenhagen, 27 November 1932

After Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers in 1933, Capa fled Berlin for Paris, where he would struggle for several years before becoming a successful photojournalist. In 1934, Capa met Gerda Taro, a German Jewish refugee who became his lover and business manager. During this time, Friedman began calling himself Robert Capa. In August of 1936, he and Gerda Taro set out for Spain to document the two-week-old Spanish Civil War from the perspective of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. Capa photographed in Barcelona and on the Aragon front, then went on to the Huesca front, until he finally arrived at Cordoba, where he took the picture that would be his most famous. It shows a  Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) Militiaman who had just been shot and is in the act of falling to his death:

Robert Capa, Falling Republican Militiaman, Spain 1936

It appeared in Vu, No. 447, on 23 September 1936. The picture occupied the upper left half of a double-page spread entitled La Guerre Civile en Espagne. Responsible for the layout was Alex Liberman, later art director of the American Vogue, who thus was the first to recognize the visual power of the photograph. In July of 1937, while Capa attended to business in Paris, Taro covered the fighting at Brunete, west of Madrid. During a confused retreat, she was fatally injured by a Loyalist tank. In September, Capa made his first trip to the United States, to visit his mother and brother Cornell in New York and to negotiate a contract with Life magazine. In 1938. Capa spent seven months in China with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens documenting Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion.

Robert Capa, Departure of Chiang Kai-shek's German military advisors. Hankow, 1938

In 1938, Capa covered the fall of Barcelona. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, in March, he photographed the defeated and exiled Republican soldiers in internment camps in France. He then worked on various stories in France. After the outbreak of World War II, he sailed for New York, where he began to work on miscellaneous stories for Life.  After the United States had entered the war, Capa crossed the Atlantic in a convoy carrying American planes to England, and worked on numerous stories about the Allied war effort in Britain. In 1943, Capa covered the Allied victories in Tunisia, the conquest of Sicily, and the liberation of Naples.

Anom., Robert Capa in Naples, 1943, with Contax II 

Capa's most famous work occurred on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) when he swam ashore with the second assault wave on Omaha Beach, armed with two Contax II cameras. He took 106 pictures in the first couple of hours of the invasion. However, a staff member at Life in London made a mistake in the darkroom, and only eleven frames were recovered. Capa never said a word to the London bureau chief about the loss of three and a half rolls of his D-Day landing film.

Robert Capa, Men of the 16th Infantry Regiment seek shelter from German machine-gun fire in shallow water behind "Czech hedgehog" beach obstacles, Easy Red sector, Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944

Capa then accompanied American and French troops until the liberation of Paris. In December of 1944, he covered the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. In 1945, Capa parachuted with American troops into Germany, and chronicled the Allied capture of Leipzig and Nuremberg. Some months later Capa became the lover of Ingrid Bergman, who was travelling in Europe entertaining American soldiers. In December 1945, Bergman tried to persuade him to marry her, but Capa didn't want to live in Hollywood, and their relationship ended in 1946.

Robert Capa, Spanish Civil War, Barcelona 1936. The boy is wearing a cap of the Steel Battalions, of the "Union de Hermans Proletarios" (Union of Proletarian Brothers), an anarchist militia.

After the war, Capa became an American citizen. In 1947, together with his friends Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, Capa founded Magnum, a photo agency run as a photographers' cooperative. He spent a month traveling in the Soviet Union with his friend John Steinbeck, and also visited Czechoslovakia and Budapest. Between 1948 and 1950, Capa made three trips to Israel. On the first, he photographed the declaration of Israel's independence and covered the fighting that followed. On the two subsequent trips, he concentrated on the plight of refugees arriving in the country. He also visited Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia and photographed the former concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Robert Capa, Ain Karin, a Transylvanian Jew who had spent nine years in Nazi concentration camps, arriving in Israel in 1949

From 1950, Capa lived in Paris and served as president of Magnum, devoting much time to the agency's business and to the recruitment and promotion of young photographers. Because of allegations that he had been a communist, the U.S. government suspended his passport for several months in 1953, during which time he was unable to travel on work assignments.

Robert Capa, Vietnam, 1954

In 1954, while travelling in Japan, Capa received a request from Life to fill in for its photographer in Indochina. He arrived in Hanoi early in May. From there he travelled to Luang Prabang, Laos, to photograph the wounded French soldiers who had been captured at Dien Bien Phu and released by the Vietminh. On May 25, he accompanied a French convoy whose mission was to evacuate two indefensible outposts in the Red River delta. While the convoy was halted at one point, Capa wandered with a detachment of soldiers into a field beside the road. He stepped on a landmine, and was killed with his camera in his hand. "This war is like an actress who is getting old. It is less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous", Capa had said before.

Gerda Taro

 Gerda Taro, A woman in Barcelona training for the Republican militia, August 1936

Gerda Taro (1910-1937) was born Gerda Pohorylle, daughter of a liberal Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany. The family moved to Leipzig when Gerda was nineteen, where the growing strength of the National Socialists and a new circle of friends drew her into involvement in local leftist organizations. In 1933, she was arrested for participating in an anti-Nazi protest campaign. Eventually, the entire Pohorylle family was forced to leave Nazi Germany toward different destinations. Taro, who left for Paris,  would not see her family again.

 Anom., Gerda Taro and Robert Capa in Paris, 1936

After a year in Paris spent struggling for work, Gerda met Hungarian photographer André Friedmann, who would later change his name to Robert Capa. A romance developed between Gerda and André, and Gerda increasingly managed the business side of André’s work, while beginning to experiment with taking her own photographs. In February of 1936, she obtained her first press card. Gerda and André, frustrated with their lack of success selling his stories, constructed a fictional American photographer named Robert Capa, under whose identity they might fare better than as one of many Eastern European Jewish émigrés in Paris. Gerda, in turn, changed her last name to Taro, taken from the Japanese artist Taro Okamoto. 

Gerda Taro, Onboard the Jaime I, "The Spanish Battleship Potemkin", Almería, 1937

When the Spanish Civil War broke out on July 17, 1936, Taro and Capa immediately arranged to go to Barcelona. They photographed side-by-side, often recording the same scenes. Their pictures from this period are easily distinguishable because they used cameras that produced negatives with different proportions; Taro the square-format Rollei, and Capa the rectangular Leica. From the outset, the photographic team of Taro and Capa published in magazines with established reputations like Vu in France or the Züricher Illustrierte in Switzerland. 

Gerda Taro, Boy in the uniform of the Iberian Anarchist Federation, 1936

Taro and Capa returned to Paris for the fall and early winter, and made a second trip to Spain in February of 1937. Capa remained in Spain only briefly, returning to Paris at the end of the month, while Taro stayed on. It appears that their romance had cooled by this point, and Taro was distinguishing herself with a successful independent career in the French leftist press. Some of Taro’s most arresting photographs were taken in the spring of 1937, in a hospital and morgue following the bombing of Valencia. Taro seems to have predated Capa’s famous assertion that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” with her unflinching images of the civilian casualties of the war.

Gerda Taro, Republican soldiers, Battle of Brunete, July 1937

In July 1937, Taro went to Brunete, outside of the capital, to cover fighting for Ce Soir. For two weeks, Taro photographed the battle for the city, and her images were widely reproduced, in part because they demonstrated that the Republicans were holding the Brunete, despite General Franco's troops claim to the contrary. On July 25, as the Republican position faltered, Taro found herself in the midst of a hasty retreat. She jumped on the running-board of a car transporting casualties. A tank sideswiped the car, knocking Taro to the ground. She died the next day. 

 Anom., Gerda Taro at Brunete, 1937

Due to her political commitment, Taro had become an anti-fascist figure. On August 1, on what would have been her 27th birthday, the French Communist Party gave her a grand funeral in Paris, which was attended by tens of thousands. She was buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery, where Alberto Giacometti created a monument for her grave. You can see more photos of Gerda Taro in a slide show of the New York Times.