Robert Capa: Photographs
My dad was not alone. Volunteers from America, England, France, and Russia–to name only the republic’s most prominent allies–flocked to Spain, sacrificing in a way few today would consider doing for Bosnia, Chechnya, or Palestine. For Americans and Russians alike, Spain’s struggle to escape a feudal monarchy seemed to replay their own national dramas. And for Europeans the Spanish civil war, which was won only with copious assistance from fascist Germany and Italy, was the first warning of the larger battle to come. Forever after my father, like many political observers, thought of the Spanish conflict as “Hitler’s little practice war.” For leftists, it was a cause with a clear right and wrong. And like Goya’s war, despite a different cast of invaders, it was an atrocity.
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Capa is often still called “the greatest war photographer in the world”–a title he earned in Spain. It’s an anachronistic claim given all the brave photojournalists who’ve followed in his tracks–many of them at Magnum, the photojournalists’ cooperative Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson helped found in 1947. This retrospective, curated by Capa’s biographer Richard Whelan and endorsed by his brother Cornell (who founded New York’s International Center for Photography in 1974 in part to keep his brother’s work alive), seeks to maintain Capa’s claim to the title. And yet hung alongside the handful of pictures by which the Spanish civil war and World War II are still known are many that haven’t held up as well. One can hardly fault Capa for lackluster technique given the situations in which he worked, but many of his pictures were made for the moment, usually on assignment for magazines like Life or its European equivalents, and many do not survive those moments.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman Near Cerru Muriano (Cordoba Front) ca. September 5, 1936″; Henri Matisse, Cimiez, Nice, France”.
