Up close and personal

Robert Capa's gritty, intimate images revolutionized photojournalism

by Louis Despres

ROBERT CAPA: PHOTOGRAPHS
At the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, from April 2 through June 4.

The legendary photojournalist Robert Capa once maintained, and rightfully so: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." And he followed this belief to the very end of his illustrious career. I first saw a Capa photograph, like thousands of people, while flipping through an old copy of The Best of Life. I was captivated by Capa's "Death of a Loyalist Militiaman," which shows a moment, during a battle of the 1930s Spanish Civil War, when a bullet strikes and kills a pro-Loyalist fighter. The soldier is knocked off his feet, his head forced back, and his outstretched, right arm loosening its rifle grip. The closed eyes of a man whose life's been snuffed affected me as a 14-year-old boy. It was the photograph's sheer, evocative power that inspired me to pick up my father's used Minolta and try creating pictures myself.

You, too, may be equally inspired when "Robert Capa: Photographs" opens at the Worcester Art Museum on April 2. The exhibition, which features more than 100 images culled from the roughly 70,000 negatives Capa shot in his brief yet influential lifetime, includes such famous works as Air Raid, Barcelona, Hankou, March 1938, and Lovers Parting. It even presents a host of previously unseen vintage photos that Capa's brother Cornell keeps in a private collection.

How a young, Hungarian boy came to be his era's most widely recognized photojournalist is a Hollywood-esque tale itself. Born Endre Erno Friedmann on October 22, 1913, in Budapest, Hungary, Capa's parents operated a successful fashion salon. When Friedmann was a teen, Hungary fell under Admiral Horthy's pro-fascist and anti-Semitic dictatorship regime; the Jewish Friedmann joined the local Communist Party. After being arrested for his Communist association, Friedmann was released on condition that he abandon Hungary.

He moved to Berlin, where he studied journalism and worked as a darkroom assistant for the Degephot photo agency. The agency's owner noticed Friedmann had a good eye and lent him a Leica camera for small assignments. This led to a job at the German magazine Der Welt Spiegel, for which he traveled to Copenhagen to photograph Leon Trotsky in 1932. Friedmann's photos were given full coverage, but his burgeoning career had to be put on hold once Adolph Hitler became the German chancellor. The subsequent and ever-increasing anti-Semitic mood convinced him it was time to leave.

He relocated to Paris, where he met the three people who would forever change his life: photographers and Alliance photo-agency colleagues Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Szymin (later Seymour), and Gerda Taro. It was Taro, with whom Friedmann fell in love, who helped him get work at Alliance.

It was at this time that the couple laid the foundation for the Robert Capa myth. They believed no one would buy the work of two virtually unknown expatriates; editors, though, would clamor for pictures shot by the "famous and successful" American photographer Robert Capa. So Taro posed as Capa's agent, Friedman as the assistant. Whenever an editor asked to meet Capa, the couple would spin tales of exotic jobs abroad to glamorize the fictional man. The ruse didn't last long, but it did get Friedmann noticed. He adopted the name as his own.

In 1936, the newly christened Capa, along with Taro, received an assignment from VU Magazine to cover the insurrection of Francisco Franco's pro-fascist troops in Spain. With his trusty Leica, Capa created the photos that would earn him a reputation as the "greatest war photographer in the world." The photos revolutionized photojournalism. Indeed, never before had the public seen war's pain and tragedy in such fashion. There had been battle pictures before -- the scared-earth aftermath -- but Capa was the first to shoot war at close range, enabling the viewer to feel as if he were there. Capa focused on civilians living in the shadow of conflict. Never before had suffering been so bold, so unavoidable. He took the photo "Death of A Loyalist Militiaman" just weeks before his 23rd birthday and, though the war's brutality transformed him into a pacifist, it also made him a widely recognized photojournalist. Still, the fighting in Spain took its toll.

Taro, who Capa hoped to marry and who was covering the Spanish Civil War, was soon hit by an out-of-control tank. She was crushed. Devastated, Capa never fully recovered from his loss. (Six of Taro's rarely seen photos are included in the exhibition.)

Capa resettled in Paris, which became his home between assignments. He befriended a host of celebrities, including Pablo Picasso, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemmingway, and director John Huston, with whom he spent many nights drinking and playing poker -- until, in 1938, Capa was sent to cover the Japanese invasion of China. The following year, he landed his first assignment with Life, which initially gave him dozens of light, human-interest stories. By 1942, the man who had put a face on war was languishing from too much fluff. When Life sent him to cover the Mexican presidential elections, he was relieved -- especially since, on his first day there, a clash between the opposition party and government supporters erupted, resulting in the deaths of at least 30 people. Capa was in his element.

Despite his reputation as a great war photographer, Capa didn't step onto a World War II battlefield until late in the conflict. He'd been photographing blitz-ravaged London when, in March 1943, he was sent to North Africa and subsequently to the Italian mainland. Even though he'd witnessed his share of suffering, nothing in his past could prepare him for what was to come.

On June 6, 1944, Capa was among the first wave of soldiers to storm the Normandy beaches in France. Armed with just two Contax cameras, he hit the sand and took shelter near a barricade as he photographed the unfolding carnage. Men scampered across the beach with bullets whizzing around them. Dead infantrymen's corpses waded atop the bloody surf. He shot four film rolls and then high-tailed it back to the landing craft, later noticing his shaking hands. Eager to see the results, Capa's darkroom assistant accidentally burned the negatives. All but 11 images were destroyed. But today, Capa's shaky, slightly soft images stand as the sole visual record of the historic Omaha Beach battle.

And the day that Paris was liberated, Capa was there, shooting photos of exiled French president Charles de Gaulle. He continued through the last bastion of German resistance at the infamous Battle of the Bulge, and then returned to Paris, vowing never to photograph war again. Instead, he became a correspondent for Life and Colliers magazines, shooting beautiful portraits of such friends as William Faulkner, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Along with his old colleagues Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, and George Rodger, Capa established the prestigious Magnum Photo agency in 1947. And he accompanied John Steinbeck on a post-war Eastern Europe tour, becoming one of the first Western photographers to document daily life behind the Iron Curtain. In later years, Capa traveled to Israel, covering the establishment of a Jewish homeland, and to Japan, photographing everything from geishas to a May Day rally in Tokyo.

But these new ventures couldn't replace the thrill he received while photographing regions of conflict. So in 1954, Life sent him to cover the French Indochina (now Vietnam) war. He started the assignment by photographing 750 ill and wounded soldiers held hostage at Dienbienphu. Then, in Hanoi, he began work on a story about the Vietmihn activity in the Red River delta. While accompanying French troops razing two small forts between Namdihn and Thaibinh, he stepped on a land mine and died. Just before his death, he snapped a photo (Along the Road from Namdihn to Thaibinh, which will be exhibited) that shows nine soldiers fanning out in search of insurgents. Seconds later, Capa was gone, his hands still clutching his camera.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 799-4406.