The Involved Eye:

Robert Capa as Photojournalist 1936-54

Lawrence Rudner
The picture story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart. The objective of
this joint operation is to depict the content of some event which is in theprocess ofunfolding,and
to communicate impressions. Sometimes a single event can be so rich in itself - that it is
necessary to move all around it in the search for the solution to the problem it poses.
Henry Cartier-Bresson
The Decisive Moment, 1952

On January 21,1897 the New York Tribune published the first halftone
photographic reproduction to appear in a mass circulation daily
newspaper. Arriving finally after years of experimentation, the Tribune’s
photograph-showing a serious Thomas C. Platt, recently elected to the
US.Senate-was dull, badly reproduced, yet caused a sensation in the
paper’s newsroom. Although most American newspapers continued to
employ sketch artists for the next several years, the journalistic “sketch”
was doomed.’ Within the next decade, the photographer-working along
with the journalist to cover events-would become a n important adjunct for
every journalist. Spurred along by the incredible competition fostered by
the Hearst and Pulitzer newspaper chains, photojournalism had finally
come of age. The American press eagerly embraced the new halftone
process.
Photographic journalism was nurtured as much by the age it grew up in
as it was by the swift moving developments in cameras and the technology
of reproduction. The “muckraking” magazines of the Progressive era that
were devoted to a new kind of interpretive reporting dealing with social
issues provided a vehicle for the photographic reporting of Lewis Hine, for
example. Hine demonstrated how important it was for the photojournalist
to see the world with a compassionate eye. For Hine, the camera could
capture and convey individual expressions of joy, or, more common to his
interest in the squalor of New York’s Lower East Side, poverty and loss.2
Yet, for the vast majority of the American print media,.the photographer
was expected only to provide “one-shot” coverage of a n event. The fierce
competition generated by the growth of tabloid journalism just before and
after World War I demanded a n increasing number of sensational
photographs of crime, portraits of the affluent and the new culture heroes of
Hollywood. America was growing, celebrating, and flexing her muscles
through the biased, often distorted photographic news coverage so popular
in the 1920s.
The great breakthrough in the development of serious photojournalism
came with the growth of the picture magazines. When Henry Luce began
Life magazine in 1936, he knew he wanted a different kind of photographic
134
 Robert Capa as Photojournalist 1936-54 135
coverage of people and breaking news events. The pictures would tell a
“story,” would be arranged in sequence, and be the result of a specific
assignment handed to both writer and ph~tographer.~ The photojournalist
was now able to view an event in terms of its “meaning” and, more
importantly, could now search for an interpretation by consciously
selecting those aspects of a story that best summarized the event. Although
Life did not invent the “photo-essay,” it did emphasize how important the
essay approach was as an interpretative device. The great European
photomagazines had, for several years prior to the appearance of Life,
carefully emphasized the utility of the essay, yet it was the vision of Henry
Luce that demanded the consistent use of the photoessay as a means by
which the world should be r e p ~ r t e d . ~
The great success of Life in America was due, in large part, to the
extremely talented and versatile photographers who joined the picture
staff. Under the leadership of photo editor John Shaw Billings, the Life
staff joined together to promote a new kind of photojournalism. “TOseelife;
to see the world,” read their famous “photo manifesto” in the magazine’s
first issue, “to witness great events,

to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things-machines,
armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle . . . to see and be amazed, to see and be instructed.5

Billings and his photographers enjoyed immediate success and, soon after
the magazine’s appearance in November 1936, Life was joined by
competitors Look, See, Photo, Picture, Focus in search of photo material and
essays. In Europe, the growth and prosperity of photomagazines grew
apace: the London Weekly Illustrated, the Munchner Illustrierte Presse,
Picture Post, Paris Match, Regard, Vu-all of which created a demand for
new material and talented photographers. With the growth of fascism in
Europe, depression politics and finance, the beginnings of the larger war
now taking place on a smaller, yet still vicious scale in Spain, the picture
magazines became steady sources of information about a complex and
dangerous world.
While many of the photographers who joined the staffs of the better
known picture magazines were employed solely by one particular journal,
the demand for photographic essay material was so great that the editors
were forced to turn to free lance photojournalists. The increasing diplomatic
tension in Europe, along with the civil war in Spain, was covered by free
lance photojournalists who were often given vaguely defined assignments
that lasted for months at a time. And because the war in Spain was viewed
by some editors and journals as the first stage of a greater European
conflict, the civil war became a prized assignment for many young
photojournalists who, like Robert Capa, would cover Spain, China, World
War 11, and the various post-war conflicts. Robert Capa learned his craft
while seeing the terrible imagery created by the civil carnage in Spain; and
war became, for him, a continuous assignment.
“During the Spanish civil conflict I became a war photographer,” Capa
noted in 1947.

Later I photographed the ‘phony war’ and ended UP taking pictures of the hot war. When all of
136 J o u r n a l of American Culture
this wae over I wae very happy to become an unemployed war photographer, and I hope to stay
unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.6

Capa’s earnest resolution to remain “unemployed” covering the mid-

century’s bloody conflicts lasted for less than a year. By 1948 he was once
again staring at war, this time in Israel. Working primarily as a freelance
photojournalist on assignment from some of the great photo news
magazines in America and Europe, or as part of the photojournalist agency,
Magnum, Capa actively sought to be where men were fighting and dying.
Soon after Capa was killed by an exploded land mine outside of a small
provincial town in Indochina, his friend and colleague John Steinbeck
remarked: “He proved that a man can live by this medium and still be true to
himself. His pictures are not accidents. The emotion in them did not come by
chance.”7
Capa knew at the beginning of his career as a photojournalist in the
mid-1930s that his life would be spent documenting human suffering.
Capa’s colleagues, as well as his various employers recognized that his art
lay in his ability to recognize and capture on film those moments within the
context of a larger event-in Spain during the civil war, on the Western
Front during World W a r 11, in the Middle East or Indochina-that best
summarized anguish or loss. For Capa, the camera became the best
available tool with which one could illustrate what the 20th century had
become for those individuals caught up in events often beyond their
understanding. He wanted to make his audiences witnesses to the
“confusion” of history; and, in his choice of subjects and poses, Capa issued
photographic statements about the reality of warfare and its aftermath.
“Capa’s pictures were made in his brain,” Steinbeck noted, “and the camera
only completed them.”8
He was born Andre Friedman in Budapest in 1913,“deeply covered,”he
once wrote, “by Jewish grandfathers on every side.”g Raised within the
comfort and security of a middle-class home, Friedman was not, however,
immune from the political passions within his own country. By the time he
was 17 he joined a group of young students in opposing the dictatorial
policies of Hungary’s fascist leader, Admiral Nicolas Horthy. At an early
age, Friedman became an opponent of fascist politics as well as the rabid
anti-Semitism so deeply embedded within the social and political programs
of Hungary and, later, Germany.
Uncertain about his future and worried about his safety in Hungary,
Friedman left his home for Germany in 1931. In order to support his part-
time studies in sociology and journalism at The University of Berlin, he
took a job with Ullstein Enterprises, a group of German magazines
specializing in the n’ew art of photojournalism. His debut as a
photojournalist (he was originally hired as a darkroom assistant) came
when no one else at Ullstein was willing to cover a speech being delivered in
Copenhagen by the exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky. Friedman returned
from Denmark with a dramatic photograph of Trotsky passionately
waving his arms, eyes fixed on his audience as he spoke to an anti-fascist
group. Ullstein published Friedman’s print and, flushed with excitement,
the young photographer considered himself a photojournalist.
Over the next two years, Friedman secured only a few assignments as a
 Robert Capa as Photojournalist 1936-54 137
photojournalist. After Hitler came to power in 1933 Friedman, once again
fearful of another openly fascist, anti-Semitic government, left for Paris. He
accepted paid assignments when available, but remained an obscure
photographer who, as legend has it, haunted the Left Bank in search of
work.lO In 1936,however, a ploy to secure work devised by Friedman and his
great friend and mistress, Gerda Taro, resulted in the birth of “Robert
Capa.” In their mutual desperation and poverty, Friedman and Taro
created a character they dubbed “Robert Capa,” and noted on the calling
cards they distributed all over Paris that Capa was one of “the great
American photographers.” The masquerade was successful and Robert
Capa, now 23 years old and “speaking several languages equally badly,”
was offered assignments by several magazines. Within a few months he
would be in Spain.

Spain: The Documentary Moment

In her long essay on “the meaning of photography,” Susan Sontag
wrote disparagingly of those photographers who “hide behind the camera.”
Photographing human misery is, according to Sontag, “essentially an act
of non-intervention,” and “like sexual voyeurism,”
it is a way of a t least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on
happening. To take a picture is to have a n interest in things a s they are, in the status quo
remaining unchanged-to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth
photographing-including when that is in the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.”

Sontag’s belief that the photographer chooses to remain an uninvolved

spectator-observing the world through the relative safety of a
sophisticated instrument-denies the value of much of photojournalism
since the photographer can avoid having to make a “statement” about
man’s predicaments. Yet within the history of photojournalism-from the
powerful vision of Mathew B. Brady’s Civil War photographs to the studied
contemporary work of Alfred Eisenstaedt-one sees the explicit bias and
sentiments of the photographer. Those photojournalists who, by virtue of
their politial, social or aesthetic feelings, choose to convey their particular
passions via their work, overtly position themselves as “involved” with the
world and its problems. In many instances, the photographer acting as
journalist has a central idea about the nature of a n event he sees either the
joy or the despair in a moment of history and, quite naturally, his
photographs reveal his own analysis. It may be, therefore, that an
important criterion useful in judging the value of a photojournalist’s work is
when, as Warren Sussman wrote about the “idea of documentary” in the
19309,“it is possible to see, know, and feel the details of life, to feel oneself
part of some other’s experience.”12All the photojournalist has to do, Alfred
Eisenstaedt noted, “is to find and watch the storytelling moment.”l3
The experience Robert Capa sought to convey to others when he went to
Spain in 1936 is evident in the photographs he took. Although he was
originally assigned by several magazines to cover the actual combat of the
war-which, as he soon discovered,involved almost the entire population-
Capa knew that the pain of war was as evident on the faces of women
138 Journal of American Culture
fleeing from decimated villages. Despite his Loyalist sympathies, he saw
universal significance in the suffering on both sides. Working together with
Gerda Taro, Capa attached himself to various Republican military units as
well as to irregular, hastily organized groups of militia. He was fasccinated
with the ways in which individual soldiers and civilians coped with the
ravages of the civil war and, soon after amving in Spain, began to devote
his attention to studying these responses.
Capa also intended to gather enough of his best photographs for a
volume of pictures accompanied by his own textual remarks. Throughout
the book that was eventually published in 1938and titled by Capa Death in
the Making, one clearly sees what he wanted his audience to sense about the
civil war: that there were “critical moments” when those men and women
caught up in the war revealed the universal tragedy of all war. The critical
moment for Capa was that instant when a photographer captured on film
the contorted face of a dying soldier, frenzied facial expressions of refugee
women fleeing down a bombed road, a child lost within the rubble of a
burned-out village. He got as close as he could to his subjects, hoping to
tightly focus in on a face or a pair of hands. He was not interested in
photographing groups of individuals for it was, as he wrote, the singular
“child” or “refugee” or “soldier” who best could symbolize the temble
imagery of the civil bloodletting in Spain.14
In the famous Capa civil war photograph showing the “moment of
death” of a Loyalist soldier on the Andalusian front (balanced on a nearby
parapet, Capa snapped his shutter just as a bullet slammed into the
soldier’s head), one can see the emphasis the photographer placed on
getting as close as possible to the central emotion of an event. This
particular print, distributed world-wide and gaining for Capa an
international reputation, came to represent for many people the reality of
Spain tom apart during the civil war: a man alone falling on a battlefield,
his enemy unseen within a war where passions and politics were
inseparable. “The war,” he wrote in his book about Spain, “has become
routine, the abnormal, as always, has become n01~nal.”15In the violent
world Capa was witnessing and photographing where, as he noted, human
values were distorted, the photographer observes, filters and translates
experience via his camera.
During his time in Spain, Capa brought to his craft a new kind of
sensibility: a direct feeling for the larger meaning of any one historical
event revealed within the faces of history’s victims. By his own selection of
events (read “news”),he wanted to acquaint his audience with the emotions
he was experiencing as a journalist involved within his story. To a large
extent, Capa was always defining in his work what the photojournalist
should be interested in and, with each photograph he took, one sees how
much the fate of the individual meant to him. He looked a t and
photographed the living and the dead, the destroyed hovels of villagers, the
abandoned possessions of those who were missing from their homes. Each
woman, soldier or child Capa saw became a visible symbol. “A litle girl lies
on a few bags,” he worte in a caption accompanying a startling picture,

She’s a pretty little girl, but she must be very tired, for she doesn’t play with other children.She
 R o b e r t C a p a as Photojournalist 1936-54 139
hardly moves;only her big dark eyes follow all my movements.It’snot always easy to stand aside
and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.16

Capa was, of course, doing a great deal. His photographs from Spain were
published around the world. The vision Capa had in Spain became, for
many far removed from the actual event, a n emotional experience as well.
Capa saw the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and was present
when the Republic was defeated in 1939. His own personal losses included
the death of Gerda Taro as well as the many soldiers and civilians he had
befriended during the three years of the war. The last photographs he took
were, appropriately, closeups of the endless columns of refugees crossing
the border into France-where the remnants of the Loyalists forces were
herded en masse into makeshift camps by the French authorities-and the
abandoned possessions they left alongside the roads. By the time he left
Spain, Capa was numbed by the experience of war, yet he was certain about
the value of his work. He knew that a larger conflict was bound to erupt in
France and he planned to be present when it did. “Into the future,” he noted,
“one dares not l0ok.”~7

The Endless War: 1938-1954

Although Capa spent his first years as a photojournalist covering the
war i n Spain, he did, in January 1948, go to China to photograph the
fighting between China a n d Japan. His previous experience in Spain was
valuable in guiding his attention toward a specific vision of war. Once
again, he saw mirrored in the Sino-Japanese conflict many of the same
emotions and horrors already encountered in Spain.
The scenes of destruction were remarkably similar to those in Spain:
the Japanese were waging a relentless war against the civilian populatons
as well as against the Chinese military forces. If Capa noted any difference
betwen the two wars, it was the stoicism of the Chinese soldiers and
civilians when faced with loss and defeat. Many of his best photographs
were purchased by Life magazine and, because Henry Luce was so closely
aligned with the Chinese cause, Life accepted and published those
particular prints that graphically illustrated the desperate conditions of the
Chinese population as it was driven back, bombed and dr feated by superior
Japanese forces.
Capa followed the retreating Chinese armies, was ,resent in Hankow
when the city was bombed and destroyed, and studied all those elements
within the conflict that revealed to him the impact of the war upon the
helpless citizenry. His photographs were, as always, tightly focused: a
woman, her head buried in her hands, sitting in the doorway of a former
home; Chinese civilians running as an air raid siren bellows (pictures
similar to those he took in Madrid and Barcelona); a woman vainly
attempting to put out a fire in a burning building.
Capa spent only a short time in China. He felt corn-.:lled to return to
Spain as quickly as possible to finish his ongoing awsignment. The
experience he had in China, however, seemed to confirm what the young
photojournalist was coming to understand about his own times: that what
he called “the bloody present” in Spain was now, like a terrible virus,
spreading across the world, creating the same terrible scenes of human loss.
140 Journal of American Culture
He returned to Spain and saw the final days of the Republic. When
France finally fell to the Germans in the spring of 1940, Capa left for the
United States to accept a full-time staff position with Life. As the war
progressed, he was anxious to return to Europe. His relations with his
employer were strained-Capa was far too temperamental to work for a n y
one organization-and he was soon discharged from the magazine. After a
series of pleas, Capa was hired as a roving Life correspondent. Once his
papers were cleared by the immigration authorities (Capa was technically
classified as a n “enemy alien resident in the United States” since he never
gave up Hungarian citizenship), he left for Europe. Over the next three
years he was actively covering British operations in the North Sea, Allied
invasions in Italy, and, in 1944, he was in the first invasion wave that
landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
Capa always stayed with front line troops. He was interested in
photographing what the war meant to those soldiers who had to fight as
well as to the innocent victims who were simply in the way of the military
onslaught. I n North Africa, Sicily or the Normandy Beach, Capa selected
and photographed those moments that best revealed the confusion of war:
thousands of refugees flooding down desolate roads, widows and orphans
searching for lost husbands and fathers, destroyed villages and farms. He
sensed and recorded the manner in which the war’s combatants were
ultimately alone as they faced the prospect of death. In photographs of a
wounded American paratrooper gently being nursed by a medic, or the
frightened expression he captured of a soldier trapped by gunfire in the surf
at Omaha Beach, or the panic-stricken look of a young woman in a French
town accused by her townspeople of being a collaborationist, Capa saw how
the greater war was reduced to singular moments of human expression.18
There were, of course, other Life photojournalists who were as close to the
emotions and the combat of the war as Capa-W. Eugene Smith on Saipan,
George Strock at Buna Beach, Frank Scherschel in France-but Capa
seemed to be more aware of the war as a grotesque exhibit of human
suffering on all levels, military and civilian. He wanted to convey
experience through his work and to show, as Edward Steichen wrote years
after the war, how “nobility and selfless devotion, inexhaustible endurance,
terrifying senselessness and bestiality are all scrambled together.”’g
Capa saw how victory for the Allies also resulted in what amounted to a
bittersweet deliverance for the liberated towns in Europe. I n a series of
photographs he took at a simple funeral in a small French town, he noted in
a caption accompanying the essay: “I took off my hat and got out my
camera. I pointed the lens at the faces of the prostrated women, taking little
pictures of their dead babies . . . those were my truest pictures.”20 Truth,
simplicity, and the emotion of the present were the criteria Capa used in
focusing his cameras during the war. And, as in Spain, he stayed with the
war until the end of the fighting. “The last man shooting the last gun was
not different from the frist,” he wrote, nor was he different from the young
men he had seen fall in Spain, China, Sicily or France. All wars had a
brutal, inexorable logic for Capa; he knew only that the photojournalist had
to isolate these moments of emotion. In a famous photoessay that Life r a n
in 1945, Capa’s photographs of the last “moments” of a n American
 R o b e r t C a p a as P h o t o j o u r n a l i s t 1936-54 141
machine gunner in Germany as the war was about to end emphasized a
theme he had long known about the war: that war is best understood by
those who see the pain experienced by individuals caught up in the war. “I
stepped out on the balcony,” Capa wrote about this essay:

and, standing about two yards away, focused my camera on his face. I clicked my shutter,my first
picture in weeks-and the last one of the boy alive. Silently, the tense body ofthegunnerrelaxed,
and he slumped and fell back . . . a tiny hole between his eyes.. . . I had the last picture of the last
man to die. The last day, some of the best ones die. But those alive will fast forget.21

With the war over-for Capa, peace was only a brief interludebefore the
next combat somewhere else-Capa devoted his attention to organizing,
along with fellow photojournalists Henry Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour
and George Rodger, the international cooperative photographic agency,
Magnum. Between 1948 and 1950 Capa covered for Magnum the birth
struggles of the new Israeli state. The photographs he took in the Middle
East-the remnants of European Jewry huddled together in squalid camps,
idealistic young farmers on Kibbutzim,victims of the fighting who fell on
both sides-were published around the world.
In the spring of 1954 Capa was on assignment in Indochina for Life
along with writer John Mecklin. Capa wanted to put together a photo-essay
to be called “Bitter Rice.” “His plan was,” according to Mecklin, “to
dramatize the contrast of tanks next to peasants working in the paddies, or
men dying in the struggle for the rice harvest.”22The assignment was never
completed. Yet, in the prints that survived, there is the same Capa emphasis
upon the universal aspects of war and struggle: men trying to harvest life as
the war rages around them; soldiers, French and Vietnamese, encountering
death and, in a rare moment, an instant of peace; Vietnamese widows
weeping by the graves of husbands killed in the war. Capa was the first
American correspondent killed in Indochina; and when a Vietnamese
doctor asked if Capa was indeed the first American to die in his country,
Mecklin nodded. “It is a harsh way for America to learn,” the doctor
replied.23 “He died with a camera in his left hand,” John Moms of Magnum
wrote soon after Capa’s death, “his story unexpectedly finished. He left
behind a thermos of cognac, a few good suits, a bereaved world, and his
pictures.. . .”24
Robert Capa brought to his work as a photojournalist a humane
concern for the world’s victims and heroes. The tradition he defined for
himself was simple and powerful that the photojournalist must be involved
in his times, must sort out enduring truths within confusing, often brutal
situations, and should, if he is to have any impact on an audience far
removed from the scene, devote his attention to individual human
expressions of grief, joy or loss. “It is very hard to think of being without
Capa,” John Steinbeck wrote after his friend’s death in Indochina. “And I
don’t think I have accepted that fact yet. But I suppose we should be
thankful that there is so much of him with us still.”25
Notes
‘The Editors of Time-Life Books, Photojournalism (New York Time-Life Books,1971),p. 15.
ZIbid., p. 16.
142 Journal of American Culture
3Ibid., pp. 62-85.
4David Cort, The Sin of Henry Luce (Seacaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1974), passim.
5TimeLife, p. 62.
6Robert Capa, Images of War (New York: Grossman Publishers, Inc., 1964).p. 153.Images of
War has the best of Capa’s war photographs.
Tbid.. p. 7.
81bid.
$Robert Hood, “Death Comes to Robert Capa,” Popular Photography, June 1967, p. 132.
‘OIbid.
”Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strous & Giroux, 1977),p. 188.
12Warren I. Sussman, “The Thirties,” in The Development of American Culture, ed. Stanley
Cohen and Lorman Ratner (Englewood Cliffs,NJ., 1970), p. 191.
13TimeLife, p. 172.
“Robert Capa, Death in theMaking(New York: Covici-Friede, 1938),passim.Capadedicated
the book to Gerda Taro who was killed in Spain in 1937. The dedication read: “For Gerda Taro,
who spent one year a t the Spanish Front. And who stayed on.”
W a p a , Images of War, p. 24.
I6Ibid., p. 49.
l7Ibid., p. 42.
l*Ibid., passim.
’ T h e Museum of Modem Art,Memorable Life Photographs (New York: Time-Life, Inc.,
1951). n.p.
2OCapa. Images of War, p. 100.
21 US Camera 1955 “International Photography: In Memoriam,” p. 188.

W a p a , Images of War, p. 167.

23Ibid., p. 172.
24 US Camera 1955,p. 188.
251magesof War, p. 7.

A Robert Capa Checklist

Because of the expense of obtaining rights to Capa’s best photographs, this article is without
illustrations. Interested readers should locate them in the following publications.

Books
Death in the Making. New York Covici Friede, 1937.
The Battle of Waterloo Road. New York: Random House, 1943.
Slightly Out of Focus New York Henry Holt, 1947.
The Russian Journal, with John Steinbeck. New York: Viking, 1948.
Report on Israel, with Irwin Shaw. New York Simon & Schuster, 1950.
Images of War. New York Grossman Publishers, 1964.
Immagini Della Guerra. Milan: Mursia, 1965.
I m g e s of War (paperback). New York: Grossman Publishers, 1966.

Catalogues
Robert Capa War Photographs Exhibition
Magnum Photos with the cooperation of Life Magazine, USA, 1961.

P e r m a n e n t Public Collections
La Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Museum of Modem Art, New York City
National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C.
Riverside Museum, New York City
Smithaonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
 Robert Capa as Photojournalist 1936-54 143
Photographs in Periodicals
France: Regard (19351939)
Paris Match (1937-1964)
Vu (1939)
United States
Life (1937-1954)
Saturday Evening Post (19391942)

England:
Picture Post (1937-1954)
Illustrated (1943-1950)

Colliers (1940.1943)
Ladies Home Journal (“Women and Children in the USSR,” Feb., 1, 1948)
Look (19491953)
Holiday (“Youth of the World,” Jan. and Feb. 1953.