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Vintage viewfinder

JOHN GREEN recommends Robert Capa's iconic war photography

The US photographer Robert Capa - born Endre Friedmann in Hungary in 1913 - was a Jewish Hungarian photographer. He left home at 18, originally wanting to be a writer but instead found work as a photographer in Berlin.

In 1933 he moved to France because of the rise of nazism but found it difficult to work as a freelance journalist. He had to conceal his Jewish name and adopted the name Robert Capa.

His first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen in 1932 and he also photographed Pablo Picasso. Later, in 1947, along with David Seymour, Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris - the first co-operative agency for worldwide freelance photographers.

Probably the last century's most celebrated and iconic war photographer, even so Capa was not in the mould of many contemporary war photographers. He didn't concentrate on gore, horror, brutality and violence or wallow in the sort of voyeurism of those attracted to car accidents.

He captured the way the human spirit survives even in the turmoil and horror of conflict. He also worked at a time before embedded journalists and the sophisticated manipulation and management of imagery by the powerful laid new ground rules and emasculated photo-journalists' independence.

Capa's image The Falling Soldier, depicting a falling republican soldier in the Spanish civil war, is undoubtedly his most famous, even though controversial, picture. Its authenticity, as well as who the actual photographer was, has been seriously questioned. Nevertheless, the body of work he has left is substantial enough to place him among the greats.

He reported from five wars - the Spanish civil war, the second Sino-Japanese war, the second world war in Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the first Indochina war, where he died after stepping on a landmine in 1954.

This exhibition comprises rare vintage Capa prints from the period 1943 to 1945. Many are exhibited here for the first time and some are newly recognised as his. It is wonderful to be able to see this collection of prints together as sizeable images and not simply thumbnail illustrations in a book.

What separates and distinguishes Capa from most of his contemporaries and his successors is the extraordinary way he found and captured images of such profound simplicity. Many are made up of only very few elements that give them the quality of classical paintings or etchings. They are the photographic equivalent of Goya's Disasters Of War.

Rooted in social documentary, Capa was instinctive, audacious, brave, cavalier and even reckless. "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough," he said.

The image Doesn't Mind The Heat, Somewhere In France 1944 depicts a solitary US soldier with a rifle slung on his back sitting, as if in an armchair, on the mudguard of a wrecked Citroen in front of a gutted house from which smoke is still billowing. The soldier is making notes or sketching, as if he were in a tranquil pastoral landscape.

There are only three elements to the image - a car, a house and a soldier. Again, in Lovers' Parting Near Nicosia, Sicily, there are only three elements - an Italian soldier walking with his girlfriend who is pushing her bike along a country road. But it is pregnant with the sadness of their forthcoming parting and uncertain future.

American Troops Approaching Cherbourg, France shows a single US soldier running behind a fence past a toppled sign that says: Umgehungs-strasse Cherbourg (Road diversion to Cherbourg). Once more, only three elements that tell so much, as in Conquered Town In Italy, which shows a row of exhausted soldiers sitting against a wall and a jeep parked underneath a shop with the sign "unica."

This exhibition is certainly a memorable represenation of Capa's unique, intuitive inspiration and it's what makes it well worth seeking out.

 

n Capa Europe 1943-1945: A Collection Of Vintage Prints runs at the Daniel Blau Gallery, London EC2 until May 10. Free. Opening times:
www.danielblau.com

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