Robert Capa (Endre Ernö Friedmann)

Robert Capa – Political conditions encumbered the start of his career

Robert Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann on 22 October 1913 in Budapest, formerly of Austria-Hungary. He developed an early interest in photography and began his education autodidactically. His participation in protests against the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy forced his emigration to Berlin where he began studying journalism at the German School of Politics. On the recommendation of his friend Éva Besnyő - a photographer who lived for a time in the same house as Capa - he worked as a laboratory technician at Ullstein publishers and as assistant at Deutschen Photodienst (Dephot). Robert Capa soon made it as a photographer himself: The Berlin journal Weltspiegel published his pictures of the visit of the Russian revolutionary Leo Trotzki to Copenhagen. The National Socialist takeover brought his freshly commenced career once more to a halt when he had to flee Paris via Vienna because of his Jewish descent. 

Close range war pictures brought Capa success

Robert Capa found a fruitful environment for his photographic ambitions in the French capital where he met the photo artists Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and David Seymour, better known by his artist’s name ‘Chim’, as well as the photographer Gerda Phorylle who would become his student and partner. In order to improve their professional perspectives, the pair decided to adopt pseudonyms – and so Gerda Phorylle and Endre Ernő Friedmann became Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. Together they travelled to Spain at the behest of the Dephot founder Simon Guttermann to document the Spanish civil war. The bloody battles between the Republicans and Franco’s supporters were documented at close range for the first time by Capo and his partner – a ground-breaking new definition for photojournalism. This daring signified the begin of Robert Capa’s world career as war photographer, and for Gerda Taro, her death: The photographer was run over by a tank in 1937 and succumbed to her injuries in military hospital. 

An incomparable sense of the defining moment

Robert Capa documented the Japanese occupation in 1938 and the Tour de France in 1939 before moving in that same year to the USA where he documented the Allied landings in Normandy at close range as a war correspondent in 1944. This resulted in his most famous pictures which brought him immortality as a photographer. Only eleven photographs have survived – officially due to a technical fault in the developing process; however, critical voices were raised time and again claiming that, contrary to his own account, Robert Capa ventured late to the front and therefore had been able to take only a few photographs. This dispute had little effect on Capa’s fame: hardly any other photographer demonstrated a comparable feeling for the importance of the moment with his pictures. Decades later, his visual sense still influenced Hollywood directors such as Steven Spielberg, whose internationally successful film Saving Private Ryan was based closely on Capa’s aesthetic.

Robert Capa died on 25 May 1954 in Thái-Bình, formerly part of the colony of French Indochina, and now Vietnam, when he accidentally stepped on a mine and was fatally injured. His younger brother, the photographer Cornell Capa, endeavoured to preserve his photographic legacy.