Eyes of the World Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention of Modern Photojournalism

by Desconhecido

  MARC ARONSON & MARINA BUDHOS

  EYES

  OF THE

  WORLD

  ROBERT CAPA, GERDA TARO,

  AND THE INVENTION OF

  MODERN PHOTOJOURNALISM

  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY | NEW YORK

  To the memory of Lisa Jalowetz Aronson,

  who knew all about love, life, and artistic collaboration

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Henry Holt and Company ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on Marc Aronson, click here.

  For email updates on Marina Budhos, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  *Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

  NOTE TO THE READER

  For further details on where, when, and by whom each photo was taken, please see icp.org/browse/archive/collections/eyes-of-the-world, kindly created for us by the International Center for Photography. Attributions used there and in this book rely on the most recent scholarship and are more authoritative than older books and Web sites.

  You will find maps related to the events in this book on pages ix, 45, 121, and 203. For additional information on the people, political parties, and events in this book, please use the resources beginning on page 250. You will find:

  • A full cast of characters with mini biographies of individual artists, journalists, memoirists, novelists, photographers, poets, and politicians.

  • A breakdown of the competing political parties in Spain.

  • An outline of forces and individuals from outside of Spain who played a part in its civil war.

  • A detailed time line of the events treated here with relevant world context.

  EUROPE

  1936

  American soldiers huddle behind barriers to avoid enemy fire as they approach Omaha Beach early on June 6, 1944—D-Day. The Germans had planted these steel obstacles and linked them to explosive mines to hamper landing craft. To capture the moment, Capa had to be in the water, dodging bullets like the rest of the men.

  PROLOGUE

  BOB’S STORY

  NORMANDY, JUNE 6, 1944

  AS ROBERT CAPA TELLS IT: A metal ramp cranks open and lands with a splashing thud. Chilly dawn fog rushes into the craft where thirty soldiers sit shivering, crouched on benches. The floor sways, slick with vomit; the seas have been rough. Ahead, these men know, is a most dangerous mission: they must capture a slender, crescent-shaped strip of beach at the bottom of towering cliffs in Normandy, France. At the top are hundreds of Nazi troops, stationed in their bunkers behind machine guns and mortar pits, waiting.

  Capa, the only photographer to land with the initial wave of the mission, removes one of his two cameras from its oilskin cover just as the rush of men clamber into the freezing water, rifles held over their heads. From the bluffs, a rain of machine-gun fire breaks out; within seconds, dozens are falling into the waves. The sea pools red, but there is no stopping the soldiers swarming off similar barges, pushing into the foaming shallows toward Omaha Beach. Capa follows, repeating to himself words he learned in Spain: Es una cosa muy seria. This is a very serious business.

  Capa is photographing the first moments of D-Day—the crucial invasion planned by the Allies. For five years, war has raged across Europe. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, America was drawn in. Capa risks everything to capture the story of World War II, the global fight against fascism. He takes risks all the time—judging; figuring out which missions to go on, which dangers are worth braving, which conflicts magazines will assign him to cover. He has been to Italy during the Allied advance, where he covered nightmarish scenes in Naples.

  In the spring of 1944, he stayed in London, where everyone seemed to be aware of an imminent and yet absolutely secret invasion plan. Then, in late May, Capa was summoned to military headquarters on the coast of England, where leaders were planning this most audacious of operations. To enter France from the coast will be crucial to winning the war. Everyone knows this, even the Germans: “We’ll have only one chance to stop the enemy, and that’s while he’s in the water, struggling to get ashore. The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive,” declares German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

  Soldiers who made it through the obstacles and strafing fire scrambled to reach the beach and dig in.

  The soldier whose face is barely visible in Capa’s photo has been identified as Private First Class Huston Riley, who was injured in the invasion but survived.

  On the night of June 5, Capa gambles into the wee hours with men who know what awaits them. They are on board the USS Samuel Chase, a warship that carries in its belly several barges, each of which will be propelled into the water several hundred feet off the coast of France. Of the two thousand soldiers he accompanies, Capa says, “They are tough experienced men, some have been through invasion before, and now are the spearhead again.”

  Capa is given a choice. Which unit will he join? Which wave of soldiers, headed directly into the teeth of Nazi guns, should he photograph? He takes one more gamble: he will launch with the boats on the second round of the very first wave—those most at risk. He puts himself as close as possible to the fight.

  The landing does not go entirely as planned. The choppy, high waves and current blow many of the boats off course. Now the soldiers, scrambling through the bloodstained waters to shore, find themselves in a different position than was anticipated. Due to overcast weather, B-26 bombers, meant to pound the German positions and create craters where the men can huddle for protection, are dropping their bombs too far inland. Rockets intended to stun the German troops have gone off too soon. The men are advancing on the open beach, where they will be picked off by the German gunners up on the bluffs. Scores of soldiers press themselves into the wet sand, huddling behind the forbidding obstacles the Germans have erected: stakes of metal and concrete and mine-tipped logs that jut up from the shallows.

  Crouching behind a steel barrier in the freezing water, Capa keeps photographing. “Exhausted from the water and the fear, we lay flat on a small strip of wet sand between the sea and the barbed wire. The slant of the beach gave us some protection, so long as we lay flat, from the machine-gun and rifle bullets, but the tide pushed us against the barbed wire, where the guns were enjoying open season.”

  Crawling toward a lieutenant he played poker with the night before, Capa pulls out his second camera, raises his arms, and snaps away while keeping his head bowed down, mortars exploding around him, until he has finished a few film rolls. Then terror seizes hold. “The empty camera trembled in my hands. It was a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.”

  Finally, Capa wades back through the water and climbs onto a landing craft, where he goes up to the deck and shoots his last images of the “smoke covered beach” and the wounded. T
hen he is back on the Chase, helping lift stretchers and photographing the dead and wounded. The next thing he knows, everything goes black.

  Capa is covered in a rough blanket with a note that reads, “Exhaustion case. No dog tags.”

  LANDING WITH THE MEN at D-Day—that was Robert Capa: daredevil, gambler, star photographer, storyteller, who probably added a few flourishes to his exploits. Experts may question the moment-by-moment details of these events. We can never know the full truth. But everyone agrees Capa was astonishingly brave. And yet behind the legend of Robert Capa is a penniless and scruffy young man.

  Many years before, that young man and his girlfriend, Gerda Taro, along with their friends, set out to change the world with photographs. They would risk anything to reach people’s hearts and show the world what photographs could do.

  This is their story.

  But like many stories, this one must loop back to the beginning—before the legend, before the fame—to a time when Capa and Taro must invent who they are.

  A coastguardsman saw Capa “in the water, holding his cameras up to try to keep them dry” and calling for help. The ship, where medics were working on injured soldiers, picked up Capa and ferried him to the USS Samuel Chase, where he collapsed.

  Leon Trotsky lost to Joseph Stalin in a struggle to lead the Soviet Union, and in 1929 he left the country. Trotsky remained a hero to many on the Left who disliked and distrusted Stalin. When André was given the assignment to photograph the dynamic speaker in Denmark in 1932, it was the photographer’s first big break.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ASSIGNMENT

  PARIS, 1934

  IF HE COULD JUST FIND THE GIRL.

  André Friedmann pauses in front of La Coupole. He searches the faces of patrons sitting out on the terrace in cane chairs, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. André is dressed in a battered leather jacket, the same pair of trousers he wears every day, and old shoes whose soles are worn thin. No matter: he is handsome, with slicked-back black hair, twinkling eyes, and a ready, charming smile.

  A small camera—a Leica—hangs on a thin strap around his neck. He carries a sheaf of photographs. Lucky for André the camera isn’t in the pawnshop, where it often lands when he can’t pay his bills. Money just leaks from André’s pockets. There have been times when he has fled from an enraged landlady for not paying the rent, leaving his shoes and belongings behind. And he’s always getting himself into awful fixes. Once, an assignment sent him down to the Riviera—the wealthy beach resort area in the south of France—where he not only burned through his budget but ruined a borrowed camera by trying to shoot scenes underwater.

  Today, André must find a girl—a model, that is—for a photography assignment. He desperately needs this job. Work is hard to come by these days. Paris, like the rest of France, the rest of Europe, and the United States, is suffering a terrible economic depression. It’s not uncommon to see young men sleeping on benches, keeping themselves warm with flasks of whiskey, or scraping food off the pavement. Paris is charming, but not if you cannot eat.

  There is a sense of crisis all over Europe. First the devastation of World War I, in which entire swaths of France, Belgium, and Germany were churned into mud from brutal battles, and a whole generation of young men were wounded or killed. Then the crippling Depression, with factories and stores shuttered and breadlines on the streets of every city. So-called democracy seems either a total failure or a complete fraud.

  André in Paris, taken in late 1934. Photographer unknown.

  A mood of rage and blame hangs over the continent. Just last year, in 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the political leader of Germany. He promised to bring the German people “unity of mind and will” through shared racial bonds. In many German cities storm troopers roam the streets, beating up dissidents and slowly eliminating political opposition. In countries all across continental Europe—and even in England and the United States—political parties that describe Jews and communists as a kind of disease, an infection undermining the good people of the land, are gaining strength. But reports from the communist Soviet Union are also ominous. There are rumors that the government is deliberately keeping food from Ukrainian farmers, driving them to starvation.

  André and his friends—nonconformists, leftists, Jews—are constantly on edge. No one knows where to go, where to live. A few are lucky enough to get visas to England or the United States, where they can start again. But the United States has strict limits on how many Jews it will admit, and its State Depart-ment officers so dislike Jews that they don’t even fill the small quotas. Those who cannot leave Europe move around, trying one city after another.

  Paris has become a city of refuge, where people fleeing Hitler and other dictators are safe for the moment. Not that it’s easy to make a home here; a lot of Parisians don’t like these newcomers. After all, many of the refugees speak German, and the French painfully remember their bloody battles with Germany during World War I just sixteen years before. And with French people out of work, no one wants outsiders taking jobs. So foreigners, exiles, are not allowed to work full-time. They must scrape by, as best they can, with freelance work, often relying on their own networks of friends and relations.

  This photo captures the grim poverty in Paris. “Conditions in Paris have become terrible,” André wrote to his nieces in February 1935, “and as aliens we are becoming less desirable by the minute.”

  André got today’s assignment from an old friend who told him of a Swiss insurance company that needed a photo of a German-looking girl with short blond hair and blue eyes. La Coupole, on the Left Bank, is where many of the German-speaking immigrants congregate. Like nearby Café du Dome, this café with its deep rows of cane chairs serves as a kind of home base for refugees and immigrants. Most live in tiny rooms and have little money and few possessions. Artists, writers, and photographers gather at the café to get tips about work, and talk and talk, mostly about politics.

  Now André spots her: a slender, athletic-looking young woman with bobbed blond hair, chatting with a few other young women on the terrace. Perfect!s he thinks, and rushes over to introduce himself.

  Ruth Cerf, the blond girl, is not charmed. She eyes the scruffy young man with suspicion. Strange, she thinks. Sloppy, disheveled. Not appealing.

  Still—maybe it’s those dark eyes, or his disarming sense of humor; maybe she is flattered, or perhaps she feels sorry for him. He does look poor. And Ruth, who has come from Germany only a year ago, knows how hard it is to make a living here in Paris, especially as an immigrant. She even offers to buy him a cup of coffee, which he eagerly accepts. André explains he’d like her to pose for his assignment—they can meet at a nearby park, just blocks away. He pulls out a few of his photographs to show that he is serious, that this is not a con. Ruth is not sure—she does not want to be alone with a guy like this. Finally she agrees.

  Ruth thinks: I’ll bring my roommate along as a chaperone. Just in case.

  ANDRÉ HAS ALWAYS BEEN A ROVER.

  When he was a little boy growing up in Budapest, Hungary, he would wander about the city with his gang of friends, pulling pranks. In some ways, he took after his father, Dezso˝, who loved to tell the story of how he’d traveled around Europe as a young man using a menu as a fake passport. Dezso˝ was also a gambler who spent the whole night at cafés playing cards with his friends. The family ran a tailoring business; after the economic crash in 1929, they operated out of their apartment, so André’s home life was always haphazard. Thirty or forty employees streamed in and out of the apartment; sewing machines whirred until midnight. And as the family’s business began to fail and they moved from place to place, collection agencies came knocking at the door to demand money for debts.

  André’s family was Jewish, but not particularly religious. Still, they were keenly aware of the rising danger to Jews. When André was six years old, gangs of anti-Semitic hooligans dragged Jews from their homes and from streetcars and beat them up. “Growing
up in Budapest,” a childhood friend of André’s recalls, “one was constantly reminded of one’s Jewishness. School arguments would often end by someone screaming ‘you stinking Jew.’” By the time André was a young adult, Hungary was led by a dictator who was openly anti-Semitic. André developed a natural hatred toward anyone authoritarian or rule-bound. In his high school André always clashed with a rigid teacher, who would exclaim, “You are a cancer of the class!”

  Vu, a French magazine aligned with the Left, made innovative use of photography and design and closely covered the rise of Hitler and fascism. This 1933 cover was created by Alexander Liberman, who later became a leading designer of fashion magazines in America.

  At seventeen, André and his friends joined a strike and protest march, which were forbidden by the government. By this time André had moved into leftist circles, even though he often joked, “The girls in the [Communist] Party are too ugly.”

  “The most charming boy I ever met but I didn’t believe he would ever work,” said friend and photographer Fred Stein of André, pictured here in a photo taken in 1935. Photographer unknown.

  One night, the police showed up at the Friedmanns’ door and took André away to prison, where he was beaten. Because the wife of the head of the secret police was a customer of his mother’s, he was able to get out of jail, as long as he agreed to leave the country. André’s worried mother put her son on a train to Vienna. From there, he would somehow make his way to Germany.

  There, in the drizzly streets of Berlin, Germany’s capital, with very little money, André began to immerse himself in photography, working as a darkroom assistant and errand boy for Dephot, a photo service. Dephot, like other agencies, served as a kind of clearinghouse for photographs. Photographers would bring in their images, which would then be sold to publications all over Europe and sometimes in America, too. During this period, picture agencies offered one of the very few pathways for refugees such as André to scratch out a living.