1913 — 1954
Across a life and career cut tragically short at the age of 40, the American-Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa (born Endre Ernő Friedmann) cemented himself as perhaps history's most influential war and combat photographer. Having fled Hungary for Berlin at 18, Friedmann became a darkroom assistant, and then a staff photographer for the agency Dephot in parallel with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party. Friedmann was Jewish, and decided to relocate again to Paris in 1933, where he met the female German-Jewish war photographer Gerda Taro, taking the alias of Robert Capa to keep his heritage hidden.
Capa's first published photograph depicted a 1932 address by Leon Trotsky in Copenhagen. He documented the Spanish Civil War, and in 1947 founded Magnum Photos alongside six peers, including Maria Eisner and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Capa's most famous photograph, Death of a Loyalist Soldier (1936), depicted a soldier losing grip on his rifle, collapsing backward, having been fatally shot in the head. In the many decades that followed, intense debate has raged about the authenticity of the picture. Its impact remains indisputable.
Taro died in a collision between her motor car and a tank in 1937, and Capa joined Ernest Hemingway to continue photographing the Civil War. His photographs of Imperial Japan's invasion of China were published in Life magazine in 1938, and in the '40s he had a brief affair with the Hollywood actress Ingrid Bergman. It was while shooting for Life in 1954, in Vietnam, that Capa stepped on a landmine, having left his Jeep to capture a photograph on foot. He was killed instantly.
Capa shot on 35mm film in such a way that revolutionised war photography. His work has been published and exhibited globally.
