Biography
1913
Robert Capa was born in Budapest on 22 October 1913 as Endre Friedmann, the second child of Henrietta Julianna Berkovits and Dávid Friedmann. László, the first son of the middle-class Jewish family, was born in 1911, while the third, Kornél, was born in 1918.
Unidentified photographer: The baby photograph of Endre Ernő Friedmann, Budapest, Hungary, 1913
© Collection Capa/Magnum Photos
1923
In September 1919, six-year-old Endre Friedmann was enrolled by his parents at the Lutheran elementary school in Deák Square. After completing the four years of elementary school, he attended the Israelite community’s gymnasium, but this institution proved to be only a brief episode in his educational career: in 1923, that is, in the same year, he became a student at the Madách Imre Gymnasium. In 1929, as a teenager, he joined Lajos Kassák’s left-wing progressive circle and aspired to be a journalist.
© Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library – Budapest Collection
1928
Between 1916 and 1945, the legendary studio and private school of the photographer József Pécsi operated on the top floor of 8 Dorottya Street. Éva Besnyő, with whom Capa lived in the same house, started in 1928, and then Endre Friedmann also attended the school afterwards. Many other women learned the trade as well at his school. Kati Horna – at that time Kati Deutsch as well – and Ata Kandó (née Etelka Görög) were also Pécsi students. Endre Friedmann, the later Robert Capa, was known to all three of them, and their lives crossed in later years. Being leftist, they were members of Lajos Kassák’s Munka Circle, they were interested in contemporary art trends and later became world-famous photographers.
© Kincses Károly gyűjteménye© Károly Kincses Collection
1930
Endre Friedmann was forced to leave Hungary in 1931 because of his participation in a left-wing demonstration. He went to Berlin, where he studied journalism at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German Academy for Politics) and worked for the Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst) photo agency. Hitler’s rise to power forced him to leave Germany in 1933, and, after a six-month stay in Vienna, he returned to Budapest, where he made contact with his left-wing friends. He worked as a photographer and often visited the studio of József Pécsi.
© Hungarian National Museum – Historical Photo Department
1933
In 1933, he arrived in Paris as Endre Friedmann, but initially used the name André Friedmann. A year later, he met Gerta Pohorylle and together they decided to adopt the names Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. In Capa’s case, the name change was just one element in constructing a new identity: the fictional American photographer was a well-combed gentleman, so Endre cut his hair and began wearing a suit.
Unidentified photographer: André Friedmann Robert Capa, c. 1933
© Collection Capa/Magnum Photos
1935
1936
Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David “Chim” Seymour made their debut as war correspondents in the Spanish Civil War. Their commitment to photojournalism and their left-wing ideological stance led the three friends to fight the increasing fascism in Europe with their cameras on various fronts of the war. Accredited by the Catalan Comissariat de Propaganda, their photographic work was published in various outlets.
© 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography
1936
The debate that has flared up from time to time on the question of the poignancy of the photograph titled Falling Soldier may be put to rest by the story told in the recovered radio interview, if we can treat it as fact. The photograph was first published in Volume 445 of VU, presented here, on September 23, 1936. The title of the report running across the pages is La Guerre Civile en Espagne (Civil War in Spain). At the time, the photograph depicting all soldiers killed in the Civil War in the form of this one lonely victim was not accompanied by the caption that would later become widely known – Falling Soldier.
1937
The Spanish Civil War attracted a great deal of international attention as newsmakers and creatives alike were intent on raising awareness about the cruelty of the conflict between Fascist and Loyalist forces. One masterful documentary chronicling the events was produced by Joris Ivens, with Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos writing and reading the narration for the film.
© National Archives and Records Administration
1937
On July 25, 1937 Gerda Taro reported on the battle of Brunete embedded in life-threatening situations, against the express orders of the Republican commander. When the events became completely chaotic, she and her escort decided to return to Madrid. She was standing on the steps of a truck carrying wounded men when suddenly a Republican tank appeared and crashed into them. Gerda suffered serious injuries and died the next day. Capa was in Paris at the time to sell their photographs. He suffered an unimaginable loss with Gerda’s death.
1938
The Mexican Suitcase is three small cardboard boxes with a total of 4,500 35 mm negatives from the Spanish Civil War. The negatives were thought to be lost after being passed from hand to hand in order to preserve them in the chaos during the German invasion of Paris in 1940. The unparalleled treasure, which has been hidden for half a century, arrived in New York at the International Center of Photography in late December 2007.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
1938
In 1938, Robert Capa’s photographs of the Spanish Civil War were exhibited at the New School for Social Research in New York, where Berenice Abbott was the director of photography at the time. Around 200 photographs were displayed in one of the school’s galleries, which, according to the school’s spring course catalogue, revealed peasant life, city life and front-line trenches in Spain of the time.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
1938
Designed by André Kertész, Death in the Making, published in early 1938, is a touching tribute to “Gerda Taró, who spent a year on the Spanish front and never came back”. he photographs and accompanying texts show the horrors of war, a conflict of unusual brutality in Europe and with many civilian casualties. In the press coverage of the time, these are the photos that bring the tragic events closer to the people. The book’s photographs, arranged in thematic units, with accompanying texts edited by Robert Capa, tell a story of history, of soldiers fighting, of families displaced, of women left alone, of children playing in the rubble.
© Park Könyvkiadó, 2021
1938
Responding to a growing need for films bringing higher prestige and better business perspectives, Capa and Taro sought to get assignments to shoot newsreels to cover the Second Sino-Japanese war for the French branch of Time Inc. (The March of Times). After Taro’s untimely death, Capa took an assignment by LIFE and also ended up joining a small film crew led by Joris Ivens as director and John Fernhout – Éva Besnyő’s husband at the time – as cameraman, making the documentary The 400 Million in China in 1938.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
1939
In October 1939, he sailed to New York to visit his mother and brother. With the rise of fascism in Europe at the time, the situation for those of left-wing Jewish origin was becoming increasingly difficult. With the entry of the USA into the war, Capa was now an enemy alien, and he had difficulties there, too. He was not allowed to leave the ten-mile radius of New York and could not take pictures in public.
© Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1938
1940
In 1940, Capa’s American visa was due to expire, and in order to avoid having to leave the country, he entered into a marriage of convenience with Toni Sorel. To legalize the marriage, he had to leave the country for six months, so he went to Mexico on assignment for LIFE, where he photographed the presidential election campaign. It was then and there that he met again Kati Deutsch, another student of József Pécsi, whom he had met in Budapest, and with whom he had an emotional relationship that is yet to be explored.
© Collection Capa/Magnum Photos
1941
In 1941, he and Diana Forbes-Robertson authored a book called The Battle of Waterloo Road. For the publication, Capa photographed London in wartime, the civilian life, and the aftermath of German air raids.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1941
Capa and Hemingway met during the Spanish Civil War. A friendship developed between them, with Hemingway enjoying being a mentor to the photographer. Capa later confessed that he “adopted Hemingway as a father.” A year after the Civil War ended, Capa photographed the writer, his wife, and actor Gary Cooper, a lifelong friend of Hemingway, on a duck and pheasant hunt (LIFE, November 24, 1941).
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Kortárs Fotográfiai Központ
1943
As an accredited war correspondent in the US Army from March 1943, he took part in the successful operations in North Africa and Sicily, arriving with the Allies in liberated Naples.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1944
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he took part in the Allied operation, landing with the first American troops in Normandy. His life was in danger as he captured the historic moments; although he shot several rolls of film, only The Magnificent Eleven survived. These images inspired Steven Spielberg for the opening shots of Saving Private Ryan.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
1940, 1944
Capa captured one of the cruelest moments of the Second World War: the liberated mob’s public harassment and humiliation of women – horizontal collaborators – who had come into contact with German soldiers during the Occupation.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1945
Ingrid Bergman and Robert Capa met in the Ritz Hotel in Paris in June 1945, when the actress was visiting Europe to entertain US troops. Their flirting turned into a passionate affair, which served the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Bergman was completely enamored by the charm and free spirit of Capa; she was even willing to divorce her husband of the time, but Capa was “not the marrying kind.” While Capa even followed Bergman to Hollywood, kindling and then disappointedly giving up on his desires to enter the film industry, their relationship eventually ended.
© Courtesy Carl Goodwin © Collection Capa/Magnum Photos
1947
Magnum Photos was founded after the proposal of Robert Capa in 1947 – two years after the end of World War II – in the Museum of Modern Art, NY, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David “Chim” Seymour. According to recollections, the name – meaning large in Latin, as well as a large bottle of champagne, or a handgun – was also suggested by Robert Capa, and accepted unanimously. Magnum Photos Inc. was the first agency founded by a group of independent photographers in the manner of a co-operative in which every member was an equal shareholder. The idea was to create a new kind of agency, free from the pressures of magazine journalism, allowing members to decide on which projects to work on and for how long as well as to pertain the copyright to the authors of the imagery and not the magazine commissioning or publishing them. Global in nature, the agency operated with offices in New York and Paris, while the members divided the world into geographic territories for each of them to cover. More of an experiment than a professionally run enterprise with a well-conceived business strategy, Magnum survived the first years thanks to hard work, good fortune, the help of friends and the quality of their pictures.
© Magnum Group/Magnum Photos
1947
After the war, Capa was granted US citizenship and travelled to the Soviet Union in 1947, accompanying John Steinbeck. During the three months of the trip, he took thousands of photographs of everyday life in Russia during the Cold War. Subsequently, in 1948, the volume John Steinbeck: A Russian Journal with photographs by Robert Capa was published by Viking Press. After their return, the Herald Tribune organized a conference at which Capa said in his lecture: “We do not know who started this vicious and insane game of stupid accusations and violent criticism. It is not very important who started it. The important thing is: Who is going to stop it? The people of Russia, in our little experience, want the same things our people do – food, shelter, security and the ability to raise and feed and educate their children in peace. And this is the really important thing. That is all.”
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1947
One of the first projects of Magnum Photos was to produce a series of photographs of families in different places around the world, entitled People Are People The World Over. John Morris, who was then picture editor at Ladies’ Home Journal, secured funding from the picture magazine. The idea was that Roger would work on the photo series in Africa, Chim on German and French families. Capa was supposed to take pictures for the series in the Soviet Union, while also shooting for the book with Steinbeck; however, he ended up taking pictures during an Eastern European stop on their return trip, in Furolac, a village in Slovakia.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1948
Capa spent six weeks in Hungary in 1948 to capture the devastation of the war and the emergence of communist ideas. His photographic account was published with the title Conversation in Budapest in the American magazine Holiday in November 1949. On his trip to Hungary, he was accompanied by another member of the Magnum Photos and a good friend of Capa’s, David “Chim” Seymour and János Reismann. Their pictures were exhibited the following year in Paris, Rome, and Grenoble, titled “Quelques images de Hongrie.” While Capa took photographs for Holiday, Chim was commissioned by UNICEF to travel through five European countries – Austria,Greece, Italy, Hungary, and Poland – to report on the fate of the about 13 million children in Europe who were orphaned.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1944. June 6, 1944
The published biographical volume is titled Slightly Out of Focus, in reference to a caption for a D-Day photograph published in Life on June 19, 1944: “immense excitement of the moment made Photographer Capa move his camera and blur picture.” According to the book: the handed over to a military courier arrived at LIFE’s London office on the evening of June 7, where the emulsion melted during the hasty drying process after developing the exposed films. So out of all the shots, only the images known as “The Magnificent Eleven” (ten, in fact) remained, which should forever be among the world’s most famous war photographs.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1949
Capa took photographs in Israel several times between 1948 and 1950. He captured the reality of the newly founded Jewish state’s first years, from the arrival of the immigrants, through the everyday life of refugee camps, until the finding of their new homes, with all the expectations, joy, pain, and doubt involved. The photos were published, with a text by Irwin Shaw, in Report on Israel (Simon & Schuster; 1950), as well as in the April 1950 issue of Holiday with a lot of color images.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1954
Before his fateful trip to Indochina, Capa went to Japan at the invitation by the local Mainichi Newspaper, which was about to launch a photography magazine, Camera Mainichi and commissioned Capa to do its promotional campaign. During the six-week visit, he gave lectures, met presidents of camera companies, and took photographs with equipment supplied by the magazine with no restrictions. He interacted with local photographers and gained a first-hand insight into the contemporary Japanese world; he had the opportunity to show the Asian country and its people from the perspective of someone from the West while also highlighting some nuances of the Japan-U.S. relations. In contrast to his war photography, the Japanese reportage is peaceful, depicting human stories, and includes a considerable number of children’s portraits. Capa himself referred to Japan as a “pictorial paradise.”
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1954. May
He arrived in Bangkok in the first days of May 1954. He missed the fighting due to visa arrangements, but when the Vietnamese announced that hundreds of wounded could be evacuated from the thousands of POWs, Capa immediately traveled to Luang Prabang in northern Laos and documented the transport of the wounded.
© Collection Capa/Magnum Photos
1954
1954. On Tuesday, May 25, 1954, Robert Capa and his fellow journalists escorted a French convoy from Hanoi to the mouth of the Red River. For the first time in his life, he was on the side of the occupying forces. e was doing his job as a war correspondent when he stepped on a Vietnamese anti-personnel mine at 2:55pm. He died of his wounds.
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
1954
The funeral service of photographer Robert Capa was held in the funeral parlor of the Hanoi cemetery, in the presence of French General Robert Cogny. The coffin, draped with the American flag, was decorated with the Croix de Guerre Avec Palmes military distinction. Robert Capa covered the Indochina War for LIFE magazine, when, on May 25, 1954, he was killed by an exploded mine while escorting military troops in the Red River Delta, on the route between Nam −Di¸nh and Thái Bình. The coffin was transported from Hanoi to the United States.
© Collection Capa/Magnum Photos
1954. 11 June
Capa’s mother said no to the US Army’s suggestion that Capa’s remains be buried in the Arlington National Cemetery. Her son was not a soldier, but a correspondent who had worked for peace all his life. At his mother’s request, through the intercession of his friend and colleague, the Quaker John Morris, Capa was laid to rest in the cemetery of their prayer house in Amawalk, 45 km from New York, NY.
© Dirck Halstead Photographic Archive/The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin