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Africa | Wodaabe man participating in the Yaake dance during the Gerewol festival. Ingal, Agadez, Niger | © Marta Cometti
Africa | Wodaabe (Bororo Fulani) woman. Niger | ©Frans Lemmens
Africa | Wodaabe (Bororo fulani) from Niger | ©John Kenny
Africa | Hausa Fulani woman from eastern Niger. | ©John Kenny
Africa | Wodaabe girl. Eastern Niger | ©John Kenny.
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Robert Capa
American, b. Budapest 1913 - d. Indochina 1954
On 3 December 1938 Picture Post introduced 'The Greatest War Photographer in the World:
Robert Capa' with a spread of 26 photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War.
But the 'greatest war photographer' hated war. Born Andre Friedmann to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1913, he studied political science at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin. Driven out of the country by the threat of a Nazi regime, he settled in Paris in 1933.
He was represented by Alliance Photo and met the journalist and photographer Gerda Taro. Together, they invented the 'famous' American photographer Robert Capa and began to sell his prints under that name. He met Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, and formed friendships with fellow photographers David 'Chim' Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
BARCELONA. 1936. Spain. Running for shelter during an air raid alarm, January 1939.
From 1936 onwards, Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War appeared regularly. His picture of a Loyalist soldier who had just been fatally wounded earned him his international reputation and became a powerful symbol of war.
After his companion, Gerda Taro, was killed in Spain, Capa travelled to China in 1938 and emigrated to New York a year later. As a correspondent in Europe, he photographed the Second World War, covering the landing of American troops on Omaha beach on D-Day, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.
In 1947 Capa founded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert. On 25 May 1954 he was photographing for Life in Thai-Binh, Indochina, when he stepped on a landmine and was killed. The French army awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Palm post-humously. The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award was established in 1955 to reward exceptional professional merit.
FRANCE. 1935. Tour de France.Robert Capa © International Center of Photography
Robert Capa © International Center of Photography
ICP 516.
Sicily. Monreale. July 1943. Civilians welcoming American troops.
In July 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily, starting the liberation of Italy from Fascism. Between 1943 and 1945 they fought against German troops and Italian fascist troops from the Repubblica di Salo', slowly moving toward the north of Italy.
SPAIN. 1936. The Spanish Civil War ended on this day in 1939.
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535353
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Two years after the apocalypse that was called the Second World War ended, Magnum Photos was founded. The world's most prestigious photographic agency was formed by four photographers - Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour - who had been very much scarred by the conflict and were motivated both by a sense of relief that the world had somehow survived and the curiosity to see what was still there.
They created Magnum in 1947 to reflect their independent natures as both people and photographers - the idiosyncratic mix of reporter and artist that continues to define Magnum, emphasizing not only what is seen but also the way one sees it.
"Back in France, I was completely lost," legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson explained in an interview with Hervé Guibert in Le Monde. "At the time of the liberation, the world having been disconnected, people had a new curiosity. I had a little bit of money from my family, which allowed me to avoid working in a bank. I had been engaged in looking for the photo for itself, a little like one does with a poem. With Magnum was born the necessity for telling a story. Capa said to me: 'Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer.
Be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear. Don't fidget. Get moving!' This advice enlarged my field of vision."
Englishman George Rodger, another of Magnum's founding photographers, recalled how his colleague Robert Capa, the agency's dynamic leader, envisioned the photographers' role after World War II, which had itself been preceded by the invention of smaller, portable cameras and more light-sensitive film: "He recognized the unique quality of miniature cameras, so quick and so quiet to use, and also the unique qualities that we ourselves had acquired during several years of contact with all the emotional excesses that go hand in hand with war. He saw a future for us in this combination of mini cameras and maxi-minds."
Capa with Rodger, 1943, Italy, Naples, © Magnum Photos
FRANCE. Paris. 1947. Chim, Capa and Bischof. ©Magnum Photos“We often photograph events that are called 'news' , " Cartier-Bresson told Byron Dobell of "Popular Photography" magazine in 1957, "but some tell the news step by step in detail as if making an accountant's statement. Such news and magazine photographers, unfortunately, approach an event in a most pedestrian way. It's like reading the details of the Battle of Waterloo by some historian: so many guns were there, so many men were wounded - you read the account as if it were an itemization. But on the other hand, if you read Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, you're inside the battle and you live the small, significant details... Life isn't made of stories that you cut into slices like an apple pie. There's no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a truth. This is the poetry of life's reality."
China. 1948. Henri Cartier-Bresson ©Magnum Photos
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