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DAY 183 | FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERSS |
Robert Capa (1913–1954)
PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE TRENCHES
Known to say, “If your picture isn’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” Robert Capa, the 20th-century combat photojournalist, took tremendous risks in the trenches to get the most powerful shots he could. He captured moment after dramatic moment in his coverage of five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the First Indochina War, and World War II, where he took his most famous shots on D-Day while swimming ashore with the second assault wave, armed with two Contax II cameras mounted with 50mm lenses. These gripping war images earned him the Medal of Freedom Citation from General Eisenhower.
Capa was born in Budapest, and later moved to Germany, then France. While photographing the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, he shot a photograph titled “Falling Soldier,” which shows a militiaman falling mere moments after being fatally shot. (The authenticity of this photo is still the subject of hot debate.) His work for Life magazine brought him around the world, as did his involvement with the Magnum agency, a photographic cooperative that he co-founded with Henri Cartier-Bresson. He toured Russia with John Steinbeck, who used Capa’s photos to illustrate A Russian Journal. Photos of the birth of Israel were used in Irwin Shaw’s Report on Israel.
Robert Capa redefined wartime photojournalism with his hands-on approach, which was both his defining characteristic and the source of his demise. On May 25, 1954, he was killed on assignment in Vietnam when he stepped on a landmine.1 —GC