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Robert Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest,
Hungary on 22 October 1913 to Dezső and Julia Friedmann. At the age of
18, dissatisfaction with the regime led Capa to leave Hungary and move
to Berlin, Germany. Although he initially wanted to be a writer, he
found work in photography and this became his passion. In 1933, he moved
to France because of the rise of Nazism but had great difficulty in
finding journalistic work. It was around this time that he adopted the
name Robert Capa, finding it easier to sell his photographs under his
new American-sounding name. He spent most of the time from 1936 to 1939
photographing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, working together
with his companion, Gerda Taro, also a professional photographer. She is
regarded as the first female photojournalist to cover a war from the
front line and was killed in a battle near Brunete while Capa was on a
short trip to Paris. In 1936, Capa shot to fame with his photograph of
the “Falling Soldier”, the authenticity of which is still disputed. Capa
went on to cover four other wars: the Second Sino-Japanese War, World
War II, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the First Indochina War. His war
photographs earned him the title “The Greatest War Photographer in the
World”.
In 1947, Robert Capa, together with
other world-famous photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and
David "Chim" Seymour founded the photographic agency Magnum Photos. In the
1950s, Life Magazine asked Capa to take on an assignment to Southeast Asia
where the French were engaged in the First Indochina War. Although having
sworn that he would not photograph another war, Capa took the assignment,
along with two other journalists, John Mecklin and Jim Lucas. As they passed
through a particularly dangerous area, Capa left their jeep to go ahead to
photograph the advance. He trod on a landmine and suffered such horrific
wounds that he died as he was being taken to a field hospital. He was 40
years old. Robert Capa’s wartime journalism came from where the action was
at its most fierce – the front line. In honour of Robert Capa, the Overseas
Press Club of America created the Robert Capa Gold Medal, awarded for the
“best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional
courage and enterprise.” A fitting tribute to a man famous for saying “If
your picture isn’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” A maxim that cost
him his life.
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