‘He invented a style’: war historian Robert Capa remade himself and revolutionized photography | culture

IIt’s not often that you see a war photographer at work. Certainly no person who more or less defines our idea of ​​the profession as it exists today, and who is so widely regarded as its greatest practitioner has been dead for more than 70 years.

But as part of its new retrospective, the Paris Liberation Museum has produced a short but fascinating and candid film about Robert Capa in action. He is largely unaware that he is being photographed and photographers often do not know they are photographing him.

The researchers began with the 30 contact sheets — 24 rolls of film, and about 500 photographs — taken by the Hungarian-born photographer on August 25 and 26, 1944, when the French capital was liberated from four grueling years of German occupation.

The American magazine Life, which sells millions of dollars, published six of them in 15 pages under the title “Paris is Free Again,” which would enhance the fame of the man whom the British newspaper “Picture Post” called “the greatest war photographer in the world.”

In a process that took several months, the museum team first worked to determine exactly where Capa was when he took each of these photographs. They then checked it against every frame of US Army footage filmed in the same locations.

Sylvie Zeidman, the museum’s director, said the result was amazing. “He’s there,” she said. “We’ve found him. We can see him with the Free French in the suburbs and de Gaulle on the Champs-Élysées. He’s dodging bullets on the Rue Saint-Dominique.”

Above all, Zeidman said, the footage shows Capa at work, his three cameras — two Contax cameras and a larger-format Rolleiflex — around his neck, over two chaotic days in which up to 1,000 Frenchmen participated. Resistors Matt: Running, crouching, mixing, turning to throw.

“He invented a style and shaped our entire perception of war photography,” Zeidman said. “Immediate, non-local, immersed in the work. ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’ he said, and here we see him actually doing it.”

The liberation of Paris was personal for Capa. Born in Budapest in 1913, Andre Friedman arrived in the French capital in 1933 after a short period in Berlin. He said it was a “wonderful city” where he discovered “love, good wine and fine cuisine”.

In Paris he gave himself his new name, realizing that, as a Jewish exile and anti-fascist, finding work would not necessarily be easy. “If he invented a photographic style, he also invented a character, little by little,” Zeidman said.

This character is now our image of a war photographer,” she said. “An American, typically. Daring, if not reckless—taking crazy risks for one big shot. Drinking, playing poker, womanizing, sneering. This was a kappa. But it was a fabrication.”

Along with the film, the exhibition charts—in photographs, magazines, articles, cameras, and other objects—the photographer’s transition from a young anti-authoritarian Hungarian émigré in the interwar period to an internationally respected American war photographer.

It includes Capa’s first published photographs, of Leon Trotsky in Copenhagen in 1932. In Paris, his circle in Montparnasse included fellow photographers in exile André Kertesz, Gisèle Freund, David Chemin (Chem) and one Frenchman, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Capa published photographs of the leftist Popular Front in sympathetic magazines, with the help of his friend Gerta Pohoril, who worked at a photo agency and, like Gerda Taró, accompanied him to Spain – where she died, crushed by a tank, in 1937.

Taro and Capa arrived in Barcelona days after the start of the Spanish Civil War, in late July 1936, and his first shots were imbued with humanity, meaning that he captured soldiers under fire as powerfully as children crying in an air raid.

His break came in September of that year, when Capa’s most famous photographs were published in Vu magazine. Despite controversy over its location and the identity of its subject, The Fallen Soldier remains one of the most striking war photographs ever made.

Life and Picture Post began taking his work. He left for New York in 1939, but by 1941 was in London, then Africa and Sicily for the Allied landings. His 11 out-of-focus shots of the Omaha Beach massacre on D-Day are terrifying.

After the war, Capa co-founded the Magnum Photography Agency, had an affair with Ingrid Bergman, and mainly photographed celebrities and fashion for life, from Hollywood to the south of France. He was killed in 1954 in Vietnam when he stepped on a land mine.

Decades after Capa’s death, the exhibition’s 15-minute film reveals his teetering figure, highlighted digitally, heading toward the heart of the action; Take cover when shots get too close; Jump on a free French reconnaissance car; He mixes with the half-frightened, half-joyful crowd.

On only one occasion did he fall out of role. After a violent exchange of fire between German forces and Free French fighters on the Rue Bourgogne, Capa followed the victors to the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the French Parliament.

There, American film footage clearly shows him depicting a uniformed Nazi officer, holding a white cloth, approaching and speaking to the German soldiers still inside – then putting down his camera and helping to persuade them to surrender.

Zeidman said that Capa “did not photograph war; he photographed actors and victims of war. Like him, his pictures had to speak.” She said the exhibition seeks to place its iconic images in their “personal and historical context. Arguably, with a tighter focus.”

Robert Capa: War Photographer opens February 18 at the Liberation Museum in Paris and runs until December 20