Photography Collection

Cornell Capa, photographer, editor, and Founding Director of the International Center of Photography (ICP) died in New York on Friday, May 23, 2008. "The world has lost a great photographer and a great humanitarian; the world of photography has lost its greatest friend and champion," said Willis E. Hartshorn, ICP Ehrenkranz Director.
Cornell Capa coined the term "concerned photographer." His own photographs throughout his lifetime remained true to that mission. His respect for humanity and his desire to help better the world through photography was reflected in his images. He photographed missionaries and poverty in Latin America, and covered politics throughout the United States, including his classic studies of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. The lyricism of the Bolshoi Ballet, and the quirkiness of American and British life found their way to Capa’s camera; and his documentation of old age in America showed us that photographic images have the power to change the way we look at the world. "Cornell believed that photographs could lead us to action," said Mr. Hartshorn.
One of the passions of Cornell Capa’s life was a dedication to the example set by his brother, famed war photographer Robert Capa. Cornell Capa’s photographs and those of other photographers he championed, often reveal the richness of an ordinary person’s relationship with the world, encompassing everything from cataclysmic events to the subtle epiphanies of daily life. "It took me some time to realize that the camera is a mere tool, capable of many uses," Capa wrote in 1963, "and at last I understood that, for me, its role, its power, and its duty are to comment, describe, provoke discussion, awaken conscience, evoke sympathy,
spotlight human misery and joy which otherwise would pass unseen, un-understood and unnoticed. I have been interested in photographing the everyday life of my fellow humans and the commonplace spectacle of the world around me, and in trying to distill out of these their beauty and whatever is of permanent interest."

From Europe to the U.S.
Capa was born Kornel Friedmann on April 10, 1918 in Budapest, Hungary. Graduating from the Imre Madach Gymnasium in Budapest in 1936, he intended to study medicine, and joined his brother André (Robert Capa) in Paris. Shortly thereafter, he began printing his brother’s photographs, as well as those by Chim (David Seymour), and Henri Cartier-Bresson. After moving to New York City in 1937, he got a job in the darkroom of the Pix photo agency, which represented Robert Capa, and the following year he began working in Life magazine’s darkroom, where he met many leading photojournalists and was inspired by their work. In 1939 he published his first photo-story on the New York World’s Fair, in the British magazine Picture Post. It was at this time that he also made his well-known stop-action flash photos of lindy hoppers in Harlem.
In 1944 he became an American citizen and officially changed his name to Cornell Capa, in the course of a stint in the U.S. Air Force Photo-Intelligence Unit and USAF public relations division (1941-46). After becoming a Life staff photographer in 1946, he worked first on assignments throughout the United States, and subsequently in England—the latter of which Capa thought of as one of the most wonderful periods of his life, as it allowed him the opportunity to begin working consistently on serious and satisfying photo-essays.
Work abroad
In 1953 Capa made his first trip to Latin America, where he would spend much time—and do some of his most important work—over the course of the next twenty years. 1954 saw him working back in the U.S., on a story for Life about the education of developmentally disabled children and young adults. This feature was a breakthrough, for until then the subject had been regarded by most American magazines as taboo. Published in two parts, the story drew such a favorable response from the public that Capa, with writer Maya Pines, expanded it into a book entitled Retarded Children Can Be Helped.
After Robert Capa was killed in Indochina on May 25, 1954, Cornell Capa resigned from the Life staff and joined the elite Magnum Photo Agency, the cooperative of which his brother was a founder, helping to manage it as its President. While there, his work ranged from continuing documentation of politics in South America and in the United States, to a six-week period in the Soviet Union where he photographed stories on Russian Orthodoxy, Boris Pasternak, and the Bolshoi Ballet School. While Capa has called his stay in the Soviet Union the most miserable time in his life because of his constant frustration in dealing with the official bureaucracy and church functionaries, it was nevertheless during this trip that he shot some of his greatest and most memorable photographs.

Fascination with American politics
In 1952, he proceeded to cover Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign. He admired Stevenson greatly and supported his cause enthusiastically: the photographer and the politician became friends, and Capa would ultimately cover Stevenson’s subsequent bids for the presidency in 1956 and 1960. However, during the 1960 Wisconsin primary, while working on a story for Life on the nature of American politics (which remained one of his foremost preoccupations through the late 1960s), Capa first encountered John F. Kennedy. Witnessing firsthand the extraordinary response that the candidate elicited from crowds, Capa gradually came to see that Kennedy was able to generate an excitement—especially among young people—that was rare among Stevenson’s audiences. When Kennedy won the Democratic nomination, Life asked him to cover the campaign.
Attending Kennedy’s January 1961 inauguration ceremony, Capa was struck by the new president’s speech; the inspirational tone and adventurous spirit reminded him of the beginning of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency, when FDR confronted daunting challenges and accomplished great things during his first hundred days. Capa decided to assemble a book on the first hundred days of the Kennedy presidency, enlisting eight fellow Magnum photographers and seven writers and historians in his effort. That book, Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration, often cited as the first topical photojournalistic book, came out on day 110, and Time magazine called it "instant history."