by Desconhecido
On May 25, 1954, carrying a flask of cognac and a thermos of iced tea, Capa sets out with an army convoy making its way through the Red River delta. Wearing a khaki jacket, trousers, and a jaunty cap, with two cameras slung around his neck, Capa looks out at the emerald-green rice fields. Occasionally he clambers off a jeep to photograph peasants stooped over their crop. Now and then gunfire opens up, flashing in the waving grass. The muggy heat wraps like a blanket. Explosions thud nearby. A convoy up the road is ambushed. The Vietminh are everywhere, it seems.
Capa is energized, back into combat mode. Bored with staying in a slow-moving jeep, he decides to risk it and see what’s ahead. “I’m going up the road a little bit,” he tells a lieutenant. “Look for me when you get started again.” Capa walks along the road, down into a swampy stream and back toward the advancing soldiers. He snaps shots from both his cameras—one in color, one in black and white.
Just as he’s climbing back up toward the road, he steps on a land mine and is flung to the ground. His leg is blown off, his chest gouged.
Robert Capa is the first journalist killed in the war in Indochina.
This is among the last shots Capa took. “I realize now that he died for the world. . . . I lost him and hope the world will gain some truth and humanity from this life,” wrote Julia Friedmann about her son Robert Capa.
A weary, battered German soldier—Capa shows the human face of the enemy.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WHAT REMAINS?
ONE COULD SAY they failed.
By 1956, twenty years after Capa and Taro met their friends at a café, then headed to join the thousands at the Place de la République, two decades after they dared to get on a plane to photograph Spain’s living revolution, they are dead, as is their friend Chim, tragically killed, perhaps by friendly fire in Sinai that year.
Capa and Taro and Chim lost their lives, and lost in Spain. The photographers did not sway hearts and minds—or at least not enough to get governments to intervene on behalf of the Republic. Franco came to rule for nearly forty years. Spain itself is still divided and conflicted about this history. The very church square in Brunete that Taro photographed now proudly displays a monument to the brutal Falangists who fought on Franco’s side. The full revelation of Stalin’s crimes soured many people on the heroic story of the Spanish Civil War. With all the betrayals, the assassinations, the imprisonments, what endures?
Chim and Capa—a study in contrasts as personality types—bonded in their work as photographers and friends. This photo was taken in 1952 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a third member of the original Magnum team.
Magnum has survived to become a part of Capa’s ongoing story. It runs as a collective, whose members are voted in, and it includes many of the best photojournalists of our time. Even if the agency sometimes functions like a cranky family, with squabbles and rickety financing, to this day Magnum stands for the finest photojournalism in the world. The tradition continues.
Something else endures. It is not just that Magnum still provides a home for photojournalists—there are many kinds of photo agencies now, and new ways for photographers to own and share their materials. An idea was born in those key years in the 1930s, when Capa and Taro were young and penniless, seeking to make their mark, when young people everywhere were trying to sort out the conflicts of the individual and the group: the value of friendship and cooperation.
Collaboration, teamwork—all this harks back to Capa’s relationship with Taro and his connections with Chim and Cartier-Bresson. They understood that even as they were solitary seekers of images, they were part of a whole. Capa and Taro found a balance together as lovers, copains, colleagues carrying equipment, dividing up the scenes they shot. And behind them, in Paris, was Cziki Weisz, the quiet photographer in the darkroom, printing the images that they reaped from the wilds of war. They all were needed; they all had a role to play.
Inside the legend that became Robert Capa is the scruffy young man who walked up to a strange girl in a Paris café and found the love of his life in her friend; the young man who went to Spain with Taro, the woman who not only shared his life but helped to create it. Though Taro vanished from sight, she was never really gone. As her biographer Irme Schaber explains, it was as if Taro became part of Capa. Her memory, her heritage, the intense days they spent collaborating, shaped him. They were explorers, creators, together. Spain was his baptism into this terrifying profession—a profession they helped to invent and for which they both gave their lives.
Fifty-six years after their images were last seen in a bicycle pouch, it turns out pictures live on, too.
The dapper Capa looking like a movie star, with a teasing glint in his eye. This photo was taken in 1952 by another accomplished photographer, Ruth Orkin.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TO SEE
MEXICO CITY, 1995
AT AN EXHIBIT of photographs of the Spanish Civil War, a man tentatively approaches Jerald R. Green, a professor of Spanish and Mexican art. He tells Professor Green that he believes he has more than two thousand negatives by Robert Capa, who has been dead for over forty years.
For decades Cornell Capa, Robert’s younger brother, desperately searched for the lost cache of negatives. Cornell tried everything, from advertising in a French magazine to pursuing leads while on a trip to South America. Legend has it that a group even dug up a garden where the negatives were rumored to be buried. Cornell adopted his brother’s last name in tribute and also became a photographer with Life magazine. In 1974, he founded the International Center for Photography (ICP).
Now there is the mysterious Benjamin Tarver in Mexico City, claiming he might have Cornell’s brother’s negatives—the ones that disappeared after Cziki Weisz handed them off. Slowly, fitfully, through letters, a conversation begins. Finally in 2007, Trisha Ziff, a documentary filmmaker living in Mexico City who is acting on Cornell’s behalf, meets Tarver at a coffee shop. There, Tarver shows her three contact sheets that clearly come from Capa’s negatives. She is stunned.
The pieces of the story are put together: at some point the boxes of negatives were turned over to General Francisco Aguilar González, the Mexican ambassador to the French government in 1941 or 1942. During the Spanish Civil War, Mexico had supported the Spanish Republic, sending over ammunition and other supplies. As the war ended, and Spaniards were stranded in camps on the coast of France, the Mexicans reached out and offered asylum. As Chim recorded in May 1939, over twenty thousand sailed to Mexico and made it their home rather than stay in Spain, where they might be shot or imprisoned. More than one hundred thousand refugees would eventually come to settle in Mexico.
From the Mexican Suitcase, this box holds labeled rolls of negatives.
The general’s daughter, Graciela Aguilar de Ona, knew Tarver as a close family friend; one day she pulled him aside, opened a plastic bag, and showed the boxes to Tarver, asking him what she should do. This prompted him to approach the professor at the exhibition of Spanish Civil War photographs.
Ironically, Cziki Weisz eventually settled in Mexico City. He lived just a mile away from the general, where the lost boxes lay hidden in an old armoire.
In December 2007, the negatives arrive in New York City in their cardboard boxes. Miraculously, because of the temperate weather in Mexico, the negatives are in near-perfect condition. Slowly, with white gloves, the curators at ICP slip the negatives out of their compartments and unwind the tightly wound spools. Some of the negatives from Mexico exactly line up with those that were missing from Capa’s, Taro’s, and Chim’s notebooks. “Two disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” explains Brian Wallis, the head curator.
The curators cannot believe their good luck. And, just a few months before he passes away, Cornell is able to touch the original film of his brother’s early work in Europe and Spain.
There are 4,500 images in all.
WITNESS
And so the photographs live on. The lost images, in a way, became refugees just l
ike Capa, like so many photographers—winding their way across oceans and continents, in flight from their origins, bearing witness to all they have seen and experienced. They are the residue that washes up after this terrible history has subsided—the testimony that allows us to see.
Even for those who came to doubt the Left, the Spanish Civil War remained a pure struggle, a pure time in their lives. As Orwell would write: “Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.”
Despite the failure of their cause, all of them—the journalists such as Gellhorn, Orwell, Capa himself—looked at the Spanish Civil War as the most idealistic time of their lives. In Spain they discovered themselves as vital, dynamic young people, tasted freedom, stepped out of the routine of their lives to glimpse a vision of a more egalitarian society.
Pepita Carpena, who joined the anarchist party in Barcelona as a teenager in the early days of the fight, reflects: “We lived those years intensely. It was constant struggle, revolution, emancipation . . . where you realize that freedom is necessary.”
“Youth was born in Spain,” Jay Allen wrote. He meant that, being young, one could envision—and fight for—a better world.
Now restored, these photographs remind us of what was so crucial and important about that moment in history. The Spanish Civil War, as everyone feared, was a prelude to World War II. By the end of that war, the devastation was beyond understanding: the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, the millions upon millions of deaths. All over Europe children were crawling around the rubble of a civilization. In Poland alone, 1.7 million children were orphaned as a result of World War II. Millions more were homeless.
In 1955, ten years after the war ended, the Museum of Modern Art opened a photography show, The Family of Man, which culled images from all over the world, grouped in themes such as romance, weddings, childhood, mother and child, death. It was as if to say that after the world was ripped apart by political divisions, ideologies, race, ethnicity, it was time for finding universal bonds that all humans share. A father in Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in Africa teaching his son to spear-hunt is no different from one in Austria playing a clarinet while his son follows with a recorder. “We shall be one person,” reads one of the captions.
The Family of Man exhibit celebrated the essential stages of life as experienced by peoples and cultures throughout the world. The exhibit included Chim’s 1948 photo showing children in shattered Italy after the war and Cartier-Bresson’s 1948 image from India depicting faith.
Photography, the singular image, created a vocabulary for traumatic, cataclysmic events. Capa—indeed, all of the Magnum photographers—knew this. Like deep-sea divers, they plunged right into the waves that crashed across our globe and came back with their shimmering fish, their pictures. Photographs became our way of understanding the modern world—they take what is abstract, overwhelming, and bring it concretely into the human, the comprehensible.
No doubt, much of what Taro and Capa accomplished during the Spanish Civil War had the tinge and tone of propaganda. The photographs they took were clearly partisan during a time—the 1930s—when the world was fiercely divided. Death in the Making, the 1938 photography book that Capa published, reads like a political tract. Capa’s and Taro’s and Chim’s work was featured prominently in several pamphlets that circulated internationally, showing the plight of the Spanish Republic.
And yet they—like many of the young people who went over to Spain—were often confronted with the enemy’s humanity. When Aleksander Szurek saw his “first fascist corpse,” he was startled, almost surprised at the beauty of the fallen young man. As a communist, he’d had drummed into him “the mere fact that he’s a capitalist, he’s ugly.” In this instant, his ideology was shaken; he identified with another young man, who also came far for a terrible war: “Yet this fascist seemed handsome. Could he have left relatives?”
During the Spanish Civil War, neither Capa nor Taro allowed the rumbles and splits that were taking place in the Left to deter them from going out and photographing. As his brother, Cornell, recalled, Capa “was just as much against oppression of the Left as he was against oppression of the Right.”
Between two domineering ideologies—communism and fascism—was a gap, a space of breathing, of hope, into which young people rushed. Too many were crushed, killed, exiled. And yet there was also a truth that they glimpsed; something new was being born: we emerged into a postwar period in which we tried to repair our sundered world. We tried to see the handsome enemy. After Spain, Capa did not flinch from showing the ugliness of “his side.” After World War II, one of his most painful, humane shots is of a French woman with a shaved head carrying her baby, jeered and denounced by crowds for having had a relationship with a German soldier.
The photography these young people invented opened up the world for us to see, to feel. That ripple has since spread onward—in the historic Family of Man exhibit; in Life magazine, which would go on to chronicle the great upheavals of the twentieth century; in the entire profession of photo- and war journalism. Every year the Overseas Press Club of America presents the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award to the “best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.”
Capa’s image of the French woman with a shaved head. The 1944 photo centers on the vulnerable woman and her baby; it is not arguing for one side of the conflict or the other.
All of this can be traced back to that moment in Spain when this band of young people set off with their new lightweight cameras. Now ordinary people could see images of ordinary civilians thousands of miles away being pummeled by war. The far off, the invisible, the distant, became as real as one’s own life. This is the true impact of photography, one that endures today, where news photos spill into our smartphones and social media feeds.
Capa and Taro gave us a visual language for understanding the catastrophic changes, the disasters and tragedies, of the first half of the twentieth century. No one had seen anything like this, nor brought back such a record of witnessing. They, like writers, made sense of this massive devastation by homing in on the particular: a refugee girl, with her neat bangs, resting on her suitcase in Barcelona; a soldier reading a newspaper on a deck chair, next to a barricade of sandbags.
These images have a way of piercing through the fog of rhetoric and cheery exhortations. These are faces, human faces—lined, sorrowful, tired, stoic, shamed. Decent. These are real children, real mothers, and real fathers. This is the power of photography. This is what photographers are willing to do: risk their own lives, go into the fire, and emerge like sorcerers with the magic eye of seeing. To see, to tell, to bear witness. In a single image.
They gave birth to the visual world we live in now. They urge us to do the same.
Go. Go witness. Go see. And show us all you have seen.
APPENDIX A
THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE FALLING SOLDIER
From the moment Capa’s shot of the dying soldier appeared in print, it served as the poster image of the Spanish Civil War. But in 1975 Phillip Knightley, a British author who was interested in carefully investigating war reporting, made a startling claim. He had interviewed O. D. Gallagher, a journalist who knew Capa in Spain. Gallagher insisted that the day after Capa took the photo, as they shared too many drinks, Capa admitted that he had staged the shot—it was a fake, not a real image of a man at the moment of death.
Gallagher’s indictment shook Capa’s fans and split experts on photography and the war. Some quickly dismissed the journalist as a drunken hack misremembering, or even inventing, a conversation from long ago. After all, Gallagher was nowhere near Capa the day the photograph was taken and was, in fact, covering the fascist side. Over time others, who were growing more skeptical of the entire story of the heroic Left—especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, when more details about Stalin’s role in Spain became public—were happy to see the favorite image of the Left challenged. Cap
a’s fraud, if it was that, seemed to symbolize all the tattered, unraveling myths and legends of the “good” fight against fascism.
Richard Whelan devoted a good part of his professional life to researching Capa’s biography. Though he was drawn to the task because he admired Capa, Whelan was a serious, fair-minded, and extremely thorough and conscientious scholar. In 2007, the year he died, he published a chapter in a book devoted to Capa’s Spanish Civil War photos in which he carefully weighed the evidence. While it was easy to question Gallagher, it was also true that Capa had given a variety of accounts of where, when, and how the photo was taken. These stories did not all line up. Whelan could not say for certain how the shot was taken. Still, based on his research, the argument was made that it was taken in Cerro Muriano and that by matching that location with the records of troop movements, one could actually identify the very man who had been killed that day. So the debate stood on Whelan’s death.
Since then, however, a Spanish scholar has raised important new questions. Examining the slope of the hills, the movement of clouds, he saw that the image was not taken in Cerro Muriano, so the soldier killed there could not be the man in the photo. We can now say the photo was taken near the village of Espejo, and there are no records of firefights in that location on that day.
This, then, is the case against the photo: we know for certain that Capa, Taro, and Chim staged scenes to shoot. That was accepted practice. And unless new evidence emerges, we cannot name a clash of arms or identify a government soldier killed on that day. The possibility of a staged shot cannot be rejected.
The case for the image, though, is strong. Capa never claimed he was covering a battle, and there were shots, snipers, and friendly fire everywhere in Spain during the war. The account of the shot that seemed to carry the most emotional weight for Capa was one in which he was responsible for the man’s death. Rather than staging an event, on that afternoon Capa, Taro, and the soldiers were being playful. Perhaps at one moment Capa asked a soldier to stand up, or to come over a hilltop, and just then a sniper picked him off. This fits what two experts accustomed to analyzing forensic evidence told Whelan. They concluded that the way the man is falling could not be faked and is, instead, exactly how a man shot through the heart would react. In this view, Capa did not stage a fake death, but he felt he had put the soldier in harm’s way.
