Robert Capa
A Spanish Loyalist soldier - Federico Borrell García - is caught mid-fall, fatally shot before by enemy troops. Allied troops slog through the surf at Omaha Beach on D-Day. These and many other images of war were brought to the eyes of the world by the camera of Robert Capa. Born in Hungary in 1913, Capa left the country for Berlin after being arrested for protests against the government. The rise of Nazism in Germany caused him to emigrate again, this time to Paris. Already a passionate photographer, Capa's reputation was established worldwide by his photographs from the Spanish Civil War front in 1936-39. When World War II broke out, Capa covered all aspects of the Allied front, from the vicissitudes of London dwellers during the blitz, to the movements of troops in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. After the war, Capa co-founded Magnum Pictures with three other renowned photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, and George Rodger. In 1948, together with John Steinbeck, Capa traveled throughout the Soviet Union to document the life of its inhabitants. The book "A Russian Journal" was the joint result of this effort. Capa hated war, and would have liked nothing better than to dedicate himself to photographing the life, rather than the death, of communities. Unfortunately, fate dictated otherwise: in 1954, he accepted one last assignment to photograph the French Indochina war. On May 25, he ventured ahead of the French regiment to capture photographs of the troop advance and accidentally stepped on a landmine. His camera survived the explosion, and his final roll of film was published posthumously.
