by Desconhecido
Capa’s coverage is spectacular war journalism, but when he returns to Paris, he suffers a collapse. “I was so sick that for a while I had an absolute breakdown,” he writes his mother. Eventually Capa will rouse himself once more and go to Barcelona.
“THE REFUGEES’ LONG ROAD”
Barcelona, the city of joyous revolution that Capa and Taro had photographed just two and a half years before, is in chaos by January 1939. With Franco’s forces advancing and encircling the southern half of Spain, people first flee Madrid, then move on to Valencia, then again on the road to Barcelona. One million refugees will arrive on its streets. Up to this time, the city has been spared the kind of aerial warfare that devastated Madrid. Now it is enduring the same relentless bombing. People are starving, surviving for weeks at a time on gray bags of rice the size of a cigarette pack and a finger-sized piece of salt cod.
“It is not easy to be in such a place and not be able to do anything except record the suffering that others must endure,” wrote Capa as he photographed refugees desperately seeking safety. Here, in mid-January 1939, they are trying to reach Barcelona.
In a chilling reprise of Málaga, on a sunny day, Capa watches farmers pushing their laden mule carts from Tarragona, south of the city. Women carry their market bags, baskets balanced on their heads. Seventy thousand are trying to escape to Barcelona. Suddenly a squadron of planes swoops down. “Each bomber had four to eight machine guns spraying bullets like a garden sprinkler in all directions,” writes correspondent Herbert Matthews. Capsized carts, strewn belongings, bloodied pavement—still the refugees shamble forward, eyes blank.
Capa’s own history of being uprooted, stateless, homeless, is magnified a thousandfold. As he writes in his own caption: this “is the gamble shared by all of the refugees. . . . Everyone on the road is in the hands of Fate with life-and-death stakes.”
Capa sees the same exodus spreading throughout Europe and Asia: “Hundreds and hundreds of thousands I have seen flee thus, in two nations, Spain and China. And I am afraid that hundreds of thousands more, who in other countries perhaps are still living comfortable lives, may soon find themselves enduring the same fate. That is what in recent years has happened to this world in which we wanted to live.”
Late January: Capa records the refugees as they stream out of Barcelona toward France.
On the road to France.
As winter descends, four hundred thousand will struggle to the border of France. They know to remain in Spain means risking the vengeance of Franco’s troops and possible death. A column of exhausted loyalist soldiers, dirty blankets hung over their shoulders to battle the icy winds, make their way to the wire fences, behind which hastily assembled barracks will form the basis of refugee camps. Exhausted, depressed, Capa cannot bear to photograph any more of Spain.
By April 1, 1939, the war in Spain is over. Franco has won.
FLORIDA, MARCH 1939
Back in Key West, Hemingway separates from his wife and now lives with Martha Gellhorn. She writes and publishes some of the finest war journalism about Spain. Like Taro and Capa and Chim, she focuses on ordinary people, the wry and tragic ways they adapt to war. She tells of flower sellers in Barcelona who, after one bombing, provide for so many funerals that they have nothing left for the victims of the next attack.
March 1939: the end of the exodus in France.
Though it dates from 1937, this Regards cover predicts the outcome of the war: triumphant fascism in Spain sealing out Loyalist refugees.
Gellhorn and Hemingway take up residence in a crumbling villa in Cuba, where after seventeen feverish months, Hemingway finishes For Whom the Bell Tolls. Into this manuscript he pours everything he has seen—the hope and heroism, the betrayals, the cynical manipulation by the Soviets. He is not just a partisan anymore. He is a novelist passionately devoted to telling the truth. The novel will be published in 1940 to tremendous critical and commercial success. However, the Left—the International Brigades especially—feel abandoned by Hemingway, their former hero, the celebrity fighting for their cause. They wanted a tale of the heroic fight against fascist evil, not a dark story that fearlessly explores everyone’s brutality. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade boycotts the book and tells everyone not to read it.
PARIS, AUGUST–OCTOBER 1939
On August 23, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany sign a nonaggression pact—in effect they are now allies. This is the worst betrayal for those on the Left who went to Spain to fight fascism. A nervous French government shuts down communist publications such as Ce Soir, fearing they might follow Stalin’s lead and take on a new, pro-Nazi stance.
It is no longer safe for Capa to remain in Europe. In May, Chim was given an assignment to photograph a boat filled with Spanish refugees headed to Mexico, which is granting asylum to many from the Spanish Republic, including its leaders. Chim’s assignment was a ticket to safety. Capa had no visa and could not join his friend.
At the studio on rue Froidevaux, Cziki Weisz, Capa’s old friend from Hungary and darkroom assistant, has been carefully organizing boxes to house the thousands and thousands of images Capa, Taro, and Chim have made in these years during the Spanish Civil War. Each compartment in the boxes holds a spool of tightly wound film; on the inside of the lids is a grid with the films labeled according to what battle or subject was shot. Another box has envelopes with sheaves of cut-up negatives, also labeled.
Before Chim left, he helped arrange the negatives, and now Capa and Weisz finish as best they can. They know they must work swiftly, for any day now war will break out.
On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invade Poland, using the military tactics that they honed in Spain. After years of saber rattling, the annexation of Czechoslovakia, and belligerent war speeches, the worst has happened. The dark shadow that the artists had all warned about back in the Paris cafés has come true: war has come to Europe. Two days later England and France declare war on Germany.
The French government starts to round up German émigrés and leading communists for internment. Now it is extremely dangerous for Capa to remain in France. Not only is he Jewish, but he is a photographer whose work was featured in leftist publications. Since Capa is stateless, without a country, passport, or papers, he can only get a visa to enter a new land if he finds a nation to sponsor him. The French turn him down because of his affiliation with Ce Soir. Finally he is able to get a visa to the United States through the Chilean consul, the poet Pablo Neruda, now in Paris. The staff of Time-Life also intervenes on his behalf. Capa leaves the boxes of negatives in the care of Weisz, and on October 15, as the German forces draw nearer to Paris, he sets sail for New York City.
BLITZKREIG—lightning strike—comes to Europe. The familiar scenes of German Condor squadrons swarming the skies and bombing mercilessly in Spain are now repeated in Belgium and the Netherlands. Europe is convulsing with all those who must flee from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of refugees scatter to the streets and clog the roads toward France. But the Nazis are advancing on Paris—exactly what Capa and Taro and all their friends meeting, talking, writing, marching, taking photos in the years prior had hoped to stop.
This is how Cziki Weisz remembers those dark, dangerous days: Knowing he would be targeted by the Nazis, Weisz puts the boxes of negatives into a rucksack and travels to Bordeaux, in the southwest of France, to try to put them on a ship to Mexico. There he meets a Chilean in the street and asks him to take the film packages to his consulate for safekeeping. The man agrees.
Weisz bicycles away.
The images, the negatives, are lost.
On June 4, 1944, Capa is ready for the action to come. The images in this chapter through page 225 were all taken by Capa in the following days and months.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"THE MOST IMPORTANT STORY OF THE CENTURY"
JUNE 6, 1944
CAPA REMEMBERS waking under a coarse blanket, inside a swaying ship hold. His camera bag is beside him. A young man, a survivor of the first wav
e of amphibious crafts that made it to the Normandy beaches, lies beside him, also recovering.
Then it all comes back to Capa: the day gray like dirty laundry; the young men who had bravely clambered off boats and waded into the foaming water as German troops pounded them with mortar and machine-gun fire from the cliffs above. This is D-Day—when thousands of troops, vehicles, and tanks are crossing the English Channel to the beaches of Normandy, the “greatest amphibious assault ever attempted.” Capa can still hear the shells exploding in the water; see the fallen and dead bodies strewn in the tide; recall how he had crouched behind one of the X-shaped barriers, snapping away until he was shaking with fear. Then he waded the fifty feet back to a small craft, waves slapping his face, cameras held high over his head. Back on the deck of the USS Samuel Chase, he photographed the dead and wounded. And then, nothing. He had collapsed from exhaustion.
A Catholic priest celebrates Mass shortly after D-Day, when the beach is secured.
When Capa’s boat lands back in England a few hours later, he is surrounded by a mob of reporters, all of whom want to hear about the momentous invasion. Capa, however, gives the film to an army officer who will give it to a courier, turns right around, and boards the next boat back to Normandy.
Captured German soldiers are marched along the sand.
As the Allies push into Normandy, a German officer surrenders.
JUNE 7, 1944
Life picture editor John Morris remembers June 7 as one of the longest days of his life, pacing his London office, waiting impatiently for Capa’s pictures of the D-Day invasion to arrive by courier. He knows this is “the most important story of the century.” If the magazine has any photos at all, Capa will have taken them. That is, if Capa himself survived.
Morris has set up a complicated procedure for printing Capa’s pictures, getting the images past the censor, then on the first flight out to the U.S., to make the June 12 issue, which is already printing in New York. “I felt . . . that the whole world was waiting on these pictures,” Morris will recall.
Photos from other photographers have come in, but they are background images; none are close-up action shots of the invasion. The hours drag on. The entire staff is tense and coiled, waiting to spring into action. Finally, they receive a call from the coast of England: the film is on its way. Soon the pouch arrives by motorcycle courier.
An exhausted American GI rests ten days after D-Day.
A soldier sings, surrounded by French townspeople. Capa looked both for the heat of combat and for moments of human connection.
“Rush, rush, rush!” Morris barks to the darkroom assistant.
A few minutes later, the assistant comes back in tears. “They’re ruined! Ruined!”
Something went wrong. Whether it was the splash of waves, camera jams, or perhaps the darkroom heat, out of the three or four rolls Capa took, only ten shots are salvageable. But they are still extraordinary. Even the melting creates an intense effect: blurred shots of men wading through the churning waters of Normandy beaches, lying belly down in the surf, ducking behind spindly, X-shaped barriers.
Over three and a half million readers will open their magazines to see the headline: BEACHHEADS OF NORMANDY: THE FATEFUL BATTLE FOR EU ROPE IS JOINED BY SEA AND AIR. The photographs are instantly legendary.
When Paris was liberated in August 1944, Capa came across a tank with Teruel scrawled on the side, manned by Spanish refugees from the Civil War who had joined the resistance and were leading the way into Paris. Capa told them in Spanish that he had photographed the Battle of Teruel (see page 106), and they let him go on ahead.
Capa will go on to photograph the cleared Omaha Beach three days later, the slow and dangerous operations as Allied troops make their way through the booby-trapped villages of Normandy, General Charles de Gaulle’s triumphant march at the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, and the liberation of Leipzig—Taro’s home. There Capa takes another photo of a soldier, shot nearly at the moment of death, just as he did a few years before on the autumn slopes in Spain. Now he captures a young American just after he is picked off by a sniper and slumps to the floor of a balcony.
MAGNUM
In the spring of 1947, two years after the end of World War II, Capa and several others gather in the penthouse of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. They are here to hammer out the details of a new idea: a photographers’ collective. Joining Capa is Maria Eisner, who headed the agency for which Taro and Capa once worked. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Chim are traveling, but they have agreed to be part of the team.
The idea is to create an agency for and by photographers. They will pool their resources, generate stories, and control more of the terms in their dealings with magazines. These ideals harken back to the 1930s when they were all leaning on one another—sharing tips, money, cameras—and trying to work out new ideas about politics and art.
Now seasoned in his dealings with publications, Capa wants the photographer to be in charge, not just chasing after the ideas dreamed up by magazine editors. The group divides up coverage of the world: Chim takes Europe; Cartier-Bresson is headed to India and the Far East; an English photographer, George Rodger, will cover Africa and the Middle East; and Bill Vandivert will photograph the United States. Capa will roam at large. They will have offices in New York City and in Paris. Most groundbreaking—they will hold on to the ownership, or copyright, of their pictures. No longer will magazine editors be able to chop up photographs as they wish; no longer will photographers lose their work once it is printed. A photo is as personal as a painting or a poem.
“Why be exploited by others?” Capa tells his good friend Gisèle Freund. “Let’s exploit ourselves.”
On that day in 1947, upstairs in the fancy penthouse, they christen their agency “Magnum.” Later, no one can quite recall how they came up with the name—one suggestion is they opened up a magnum bottle of champagne.
Capa’s image of a destroyed church in Normandy stands for all the devastation left behind by the fighting.
Robert Capa in Israel, the handsome, relaxed man of the world.
For Capa, who has always lived for freedom yet who understands the necessity of friendship and comradeship, Magnum is a surprisingly elegant solution: a collective that protects the photographer. And the gregarious, restless Capa now has a perfect role; he is always calling up editors or photographers, making arrangements, suggesting stories. His “meetings” are often held at a Parisian bar where he would play pinball, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he talks—that is, before he is off on an assignment of his own.
He is a world-famous photographer; he stands for the very term war photographer. Capa has become “Bob,” the handsome, dark-eyed hero who has been everywhere. He goes to Hollywood and dates movie star Ingrid Bergman, crafts a photo essay on the Soviet Union with the American author John Steinbeck, photographs the birth of the nation of Israel. Capa is a perpetual rover, rubbing elbows with authors and celebrities, or happily playing poker on an oil drum in some remote locale.
Capa visited Israel three times. In the spring of 1949, he recorded the joyous arrival of refugees. The creation of the state of Israel gave him a sense of hope after the traumas he had lived through and witnessed since the 1930s.
Having lost his parents and much of his family in the Holocaust, the bespectacled, quiet Chim became a wanderer, a photographer of children, war, refugees, and movie stars. In 1948, Chim went on assignment for UNESCO to document child survivors of World War II. This was taken in Greece.
BY 1953, CAPA IS TIRED. Despite his fame and the fees he can command for his work, he is broke. Money still leaks from his pockets. He is drinking too much, uninspired by his glamorous and fluffy assignments. He itches to get back into action. Yet he’s also making noises about giving up photography altogether. “It’s not a job for a grown man to click a camera,” he remarks. But what can he do? This is all he knows. On his fortieth birthday in October, he says morosely, “I can’t be for
ty, how can anybody be forty? I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”
He is tired of war, too. He even confides, “If I have to go to war again, I’ll shoot myself because I’ve seen too much.” The cost of war is finally catching up with the older Capa.
Then, in early 1954, he gets a call that cheers him: a long assignment in Japan. While there, he is tempted by yet another possibility—covering the situation in Indochina, where communist guerrillas, the Vietminh, are gaining ground against colonial French forces. The French, like the English, have long ruled world-spanning empires. But the Europeans are losing their grip. Here in Asia, it seems the colonial masters may finally be overthrown. The assignment is dangerous, but the money is tempting, as is the chance to get in on the next big war.
In 1954, Capa found a welcome in Japan, where he recorded another kind of new beginning.
In May 1954, Capa walks with a French military doctor in Laos. Photograph by Michel Descamps.
