Capa in Peacetime

To picture a personality like Capa’s in a world at peace is almost an oxymoron. His appetite was large and it must have seemed at times that he was determined to carry the whole of humanity on his plate. A wall note commentary gives us his attempt at an explanation: “I have ended up believing that curiosity, plus freedom to travel and low fares is the closest thing across time to democracy, so maybe democracy is tourism.”

Travel was in the cards for Capa in 1947, when he and John Steinbeck collaborated on a book on women and children in the Soviet Union, entitled A Russian Journal. Capa took quite a number of color shots for the project, but only one such image appeared on the cover. Perhaps the cost of publishing such a photo compilation in color was a deciding factor, which was often the case with periodicals of the day. Where magazines were concerned, Capa found color photography more lucrative when it was accepted, but he always carried more than one camera with him on assignment to allow for all contingencies. There is an adequate number of display cases for his print output and a few copies of letters for perusal, but it is the color prints themselves that hold sway throughout the exhibit. With improved technology, restoration has become an easier task at ICP, and it shows in this exhibit. There’s a true clarity and beauty in the reproductions and enough photo itineraries to revel in that any printed text is almost incidental to one’s appreciation.

As mentioned earlier, some of the best examples of the camera’s power to evoke emotion come from the art of black and white imaging. However, color can have the ability to bring our daily lives into full focus, perhaps capturing a more realistic, if less dramatic, sense of the moment, and in that respect, a more honest one. It is understandable in a comprehensive exhibit such as this that Capa’s work for hire would take a prominent place overall. He could not simply afford to chase down the next war where he found it, and if making a living meant turning his lens in the direction of mass-market advertisements or pictorial travelogues, so be it.

Still, 1947 proved to be an important year on several fronts. The same year that Capa collaborated with Steinbeck and that Holt published his autobiography, Slightly Out of Focus, he also founded Magnum, along with Henri Cartier Bresson, David (Chim) Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert. Magnum became the first cooperative agency for freelance photographers worldwide. Much later, in lasting memory of his brother’s output, Cornell Capa founded ICP, where over 4,000 Capa color transparencies are part of its vast depository today.

The Celebrity Camera

It would be hard to pinpoint how the brush with real celebrity and its allure began for Capa. He met filmmaker John Huston in Naples in 1944, when Huston was making movies for the Army Signal Corp. They became fast friends — and then there was the liberation in Paris that had to be seen to be believed. There were lots of celebrants and models to photograph, and probably lots of champagne to go around. He might have felt in the constant whirl that his memory was a little like the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart lyrics of “Where or When” that talk about “the tricks your mind can play…” Then there was the one year affair in 1945 with Ingrid Bergman. There’s a lovely picture of her in the exhibit that exudes a special warmth we might expect from this actress. There’s also a special layout Capa did on the filming of The Barefoot Contessa that features Ava Gardner practicing her dance steps and another of the star applying lipstick. The viewer can’t help but feel that Capa’s charm must have been irresistible to a number of women. Obviously, some of his subjects were in love with the camera, but some may have been a little in love with him too.

The list goes on and on and the curator has chosen to give us some of the best of the encounters. Director Huston is there during the filming of Moulin Rouge with a particularly amusing shot showing Jose Ferrer as Toulouse Lautrec in top hat, studying his script with a film companion in an empty theatre. Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre take a smoke break on the set of Beat the Devil, looking as tweedy and debonair as one might expect. While amusing, these sections become a bit like flipping through a fan magazine and don’t necessarily reveal the best of what Capa could produce.

There was skiing in Klosters and all those Ausland Resorts that Capa photographed for Holiday Magazine that give us the bright brash whites and primary colors of such a setting. If he had an eye for the ladies, he also had an eye for the incongruous, such as his human landscape of a nun and swimmers on the beach at Biarritz. We see the nun from the back, her hood flapping as she stands facing the sea. His talent for such unexpected imagery remained steadfast, as when he photographed a cluster of white garbed males in Morocco, perched in the tree branches like so many nesting birds, as they await a sultan’s arrival. Color concerns aside, it is when we get a sense of the photojournalist as artist that the show excels and doesn’t just remain a walk down memory lane.

Did all this diversity and success signal a sea change in the photographer? If he did reinvent himself as the curator mentioned, giving the public what they yearned to experience secondhand, by 1953 he had not forgotten his original purpose. “The Deauville and Biarritz and motley movie period is over,” he declared in the accompanying notes.

The Final Shoot

Vietnam lay in wait. There are photographs of soldiers on the road from Namdinh to Thai Binh, waist-high in the tall grasses. Another Indochina landscape features a mother and child minding a flock of ducks on their daily walk, a string of soldiers looking on from the roadside — a touching example of life at its most incongruously powerful. It was at Thai Binh on May 25, 1954 that Capa jumped from his jeep, leaving his regiment behind to look for the advancing enemy. Minutes later, the 41-year-old photographer stepped on a landmine, expiring by the time his regiment reached the nearest field hospital.

Maybe the insistence on living life to the fullest is a little like the risk of stepping on a landmine. And it’s a high cost to pay. The world lost one of its best visionaries on that fateful day. We can be thankful for what remains of his images and for ICP’s insistence on preserving them.

“Capa at 100” will be featured at the International Center of Photography, located at 1133 Avenue of Americas, New York, NY 10036, through May 4, 2014. For more information concerning the exhibit, please visit http://www.icp.org/ or call 212-857-0000.

Cincopa WordPress plugin

Featured image: Robert Capa, [Capucine, French model and actress, on a balcony, Rome], August 1951. Photo Courtesy of © Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos.