Robert Capa: Famous War Photographer

 

Blurred and out of focus, the 11 photos Robert Capa took off the coast of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, D-Day, secured his reputation as the most famous war photographer. Capa was the only photographer to go ashore with U.S. troops on the coast in northwest France. Although Capa was not the only war photographer to document WW II, he was considered particularly courageous and ambitious. Although Capa claimed to have gone in the first wave, he almost certainly rode in with the command group of Company E of the 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Division, to which he’d been assigned. They constituted part of the thirteenth wave. Capa’s photos indicate that several waves of troops preceded them.

 

Capa’s career began during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), when he photographed the Republican troops fighting the forces of General Francisco Franco, Hitler’s ally. With his partner Gerda Taro, Capa established a new style of photojournalism that used small portable cameras to get as close to the action as possible. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” according to Capa. Taro was killed in 1937 while working on the Spanish front lines.

 

Born Endre Friedmann into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1913, Capa moved to Berlin as a young man and later to Paris to escape the Nazis. He began to use the alias Robert Capa and started traveling to Spain for work. In 1939, he entered the United States on a tourist visa and secured freelance commissions by using his contacts among journalists, photographers, and authors. 

 

Capa sought exclusive photos and wanted to record the Allied invasion. Despite his Hungarian citizenship—Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany—the U.S. military added him to the group of reporters allowed to witness D-Day. 

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Getting his photos in by deadline took immense effort. The 30-year-old photographer had to get his rolls of film transported from the French coast across the English Channel to London to be developed. The military censor had to approve them and then an airplane would fly the negatives across the Atlantic to the New York offices of Life, the magazine where Capa worked. Then writers would have to compose the text to accompany the images. Meanwhile, the photographer stayed behind with the advancing Allied troops. 

 

Not only are his D-Day photos some of the most famous of World War II, but they also helped cement his reputation as a war photographer. Prior to D-Day, he had already photographed the fighting in North Africa and the Allied advance in Italy, among other subjects. In 1947, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower presented Capa and 19 other correspondents with the Medal of Freedom, which honored civilians who aided the U.S. effort in WW II.

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Capa witnessed the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, from a military jeep. In March 1945, he jumped from a plane with U.S. paratroopers, landing behind the enemy line near the German town of Wesel. Capa did not photograph the Battle of Berlin. “There was one story Capa did want to cover—the liberation of Leipzig,” Alex Kershaw noted in his 2002 biography Blood and Champagne —The Life and Times of Robert Capa. 

 

In the summer of 1945, Capa went to Berlin, where he took photos of the liberated city and its people. He also met and fell in love with Swedish Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman. Their love affair ended in early 1947. In his 1947 memoir, slightly out of Focus, he presents a fictitious account of his work during World War II.

 

Robert Capa’s prowess as war photographer has been challenged. In 2014, author and historian Allan Douglas Coleman launched a blog where he and others tried to reconstruct the events of D-Day. Their research cast doubt on the story of how the D-Day images came about. According to the research, Capa was on Omaha Beach later than previously reported, when the worst of the fighting had ended and he did not stay as long as previously assumed. It also contests the total number of photos he shot, with Capa supposedly taking far fewer photos than he said he did. It questions the Life editorial team’s claim that a London lab technician accidentally destroyed the other negatives by heat by asking if that was even technically possible.

 

The former Life editor John Morris, who was responsible for the publication of Capa’s D-Day photos, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2014 that it appears the destroyed rolls of film did not contain any negatives. “It now seems that maybe there was nothing on the other three rolls to begin with . . . I now believe that it’s quite possible that Bob just bundled all his 35 [millimeter film rolls] together and just shipped it off back to London, knowing that on one of those rolls there would be the pictures he actually shot that morning,” according to Morris.

 

Irme Schaber, the biographer of Capa’s partner Taro, said it is “not unthinkable that Capa embellished the potentially meager yield of Omaha Beach with curious stories designed to distract and draw attention. He knew no scruples about such things, this is known. The straightforward military aspect was also never very important to Capa. For him, it was first and foremost about the human aspect.”

 

As early as the 1970s, others had questioned Capa’s possibly most famous shot, known as “The Falling Soldier,” The image, from the Spanish Civil War, allegedly depicts a Republican soldier at the moment of death. Today, it is unclear whether the image was staged because Capa and Taro sided with the Republican troops and their allies against Franco.

 

Capa’s biographer Kershaw maintains, however, that the D-Day photos are “real and amazing.” According to Kershaw, “He was a great artist and photographer. A rock star, a great reporter;’

After World War II, Capa and his colleagues Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour (Chim), and George Rodger founded the Magnum photo agency, still considered one of the most renowned today. Capa went on to photograph two more wars: the first Arab-Israeli War following the founding of Israel in 1948 and the First Indochina War (1946-54). 

 

Capa supposedly carefully considered which wars he would risk his life for and which he wouldn’t. He actually did not want to go to Indochina, an area of French colonial possession in present-day Vietnam. Kershaw theorizes that Capa missed that kind of work and that he needed money. On May 25, 1954, the 40-year-old was accompanying a French unit in action against communist Viet Minh soldiers. He walked into a field, where he stepped on a landmine and was fatally injured. He reportedly clung to his camera.