Robert Capa

Origins and early life

Robert Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest on 22 October 1913 to a Jewish middle-class family: his father Dezső Friedmann was a tailor from Csucsa in Transylvania and his mother Julianna Berkovits, from Nagykapos, ran a dressmaking salon, and both were Jews who did not practise their faith. Politically active as a teenager, he was forced out of Hungary in 1931 in a climate of rising antisemitism, studied in Berlin, and left Germany when the Nazis came to power.

Work and career

In Paris he and Gerda Taro invented the name Robert Capa for a supposedly famous American photographer so their pictures would sell, and the name stuck to him. His photograph of a falling Republican militiaman in 1936 made him famous and remains debated by historians; he covered the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Second World War for Life. He landed with the first wave at Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944, and the handful of blurred frames that survived a darkroom accident became the defining images of D-Day.

In 1947 he founded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, giving photographers ownership of their negatives, and he photographed the birth of the State of Israel in 1948. He was killed by a landmine in Indochina on 25 May 1954, and the Robert Capa Gold Medal now bears his name.