Robert Capa
Robert Capa was born in 1913 in Budapest under the name Andre Friedman. He has written history as an engaged and urgent photo journalist and takes among the most important documentary photographers of the 20th century one of the first ranks.
From 1930 he dealt with the photograph. On account of his political engagement he was expelled in 1931 by his native country. First he went to Berlin, where he studied political science and acted as a photographic laboratory assistant at Ullstein. In this time he published the first time photos in a newspaper.
Nevertheless, after the assumption of power of the National Socialists in 1933 the Jew had to leave Germany, and fled to Paris. There he attached friendship with the important photographers Andre Kertész, David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson and got to know the photographer Gerda Taro.
To be able to sell his pictures better they invented a rich American photographer, "Robert Capa" who lived supposedly in Paris. They said that they were working for this rich photographer. But someone spotted the swindle. After the dizziness was uncovered, Friedmann assumed the name „Robert Capa“.
Gerda Taro who was killed in 1937 in the Spanish civil war while they where working. Robert Capa dedicated in 1938 to Gerda the volume "Death in the Making" with the shots from the civil war. Capas work is decisively marked by his photographic (anti) war reporting.
Also during the Spanish civil war he took his probably most famous picture, "A Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet..." which was published in 1937 in different magazines. During the Second World War was Robert Capa also as a war photographer active. After end of the war, in 1947, he founded together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger the famous photo agency "Magnum".
Robert Capa's photographs which catch the "determining moment" (Cartier-Bresson) are no war-glorifying triumphal pictures, but timeless and moving manifestoes for freedom, humanity and peace.
From Robert Capa comes the ‚golden rule’ of the report photography. The principle, "if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough“, which calls the psychic - and physical - nearness of the photographer to his object, became to him in 1954 the disaster: At the age of 41 years Robert Capa was killed by a look.