Photography Collection

The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), jointly with the International Center of Photography, New York (ICP), presents the exhibition This is War! Robert Capa at Work, which brings together more than two hundred photographs taken by Capa in conflicts that he covered as a war correspondent during the 1930s and 40s, and which made him one of the most outstanding photographers of the 20th century. After the MNAC, the show which has been on in New York, London and Milan, will close in Rotterdam.
Endre Ernö Friedmann, the real name of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 – Tyhai Binh, Indochina, 1954), was committed from an early age to a left-wing ideology opposed to authoritarianism. His political militancy and his Jewish origins forced him to flee from some of the many conflicts that took place in Europe during the upheavals of the 1930s. Thus, in 1931 he was forced to leave his native Hungary and go to Berlin, after being arrested for demonstrating against the regime of the dictator Miklós Horthy. In the capital of Germany he studied journalism and tried to make a living as a photographer, as it was “the closest thing to journalism for someone who did not master any languages”, until Hitler’s rise to power forced him to leave for Paris, in 1933, as a precaution due to his Jewish origins. In France things were not easy because of the Great Depression, which had forced the government to prohibit the employment of foreigners. In order to overcome their financial hardships in Paris, he and his partner Gerda Pohorylle (Gerda Taro) invented the figure of an American photographer, supposedly rich and very successful, called Robert Capa. Endre Enrö passed himself off as the darkroom assistant and Gerda had the job of selling the photographs as if they were the work of the American, at a price that trebled the official rate. Eventually, and despite the fact that the ruse had been discovered, Endre Ernö Friedmann became Robert Capa through selling photographs under the name of this invented character. As he himself explained in 1935, “I now go by the name of Robert Capa. You could almost say that I have been reborn, but this time without causing anyone any pain”. Capa supported the Spanish Republic right from the start, as it was governed by a formula that fitted in perfectly with his political ideas: a non-Stalinist left, not dependent on the USSR. On August 5th 1936, just a few weeks after the Civil War broke out, Capa was already in Barcelona to cover a conflict that was to cost Gerda Taro, his lover and professional collaborator, her life, and to which he showed his commitment right to the end.

The Spanish Civil War witnessed the birth of photojournalism, as it was the first war covered on a day-to-day basis by a corps of professional photographers, whose work was published immediately in the main newspapers and the new illustrated magazines, national and international, that were just then beginning to use photography to complement their reports. From then on, all the wars were followed on the pages of the most important publications, like the French Vu, Regards, Match and Ce Soir, the British Picture Post and Weekly Illustrated or the American Life, and they printed many of the photographs taken by Capa that have become icons of some of the most important moments of the first half of the 20th century. Capa produced some of the most famous images of the Spanish Civil War, like Death of a Militiaman (The Falling Soldier), one of the most emblematic war photographs in history, which captures the precise moment when a republican militiaman falls dead at Cerro Muriano (Córdoba). The international recognition that Capa gained in this war allowed him to be given assignments and permission to cover the Japanese occupation of China (1938), the Second World War (1941-1945), with his outstanding photographs of the D-Day landings, the First Arab-Israeli War (1948) and the First Indochina War (1954). Robert Capa once said that his most fervent wish was to have nothing to cover as a war photographer, but the truth is that during his career there were precious few moments of peace. During those brief periods he photographed the society of the time, the life in the cafés of Paris, sporting events like the Tour de France, and he portrayed some of his many friends: Ernest Hemingway, Ingrid Bergman, John Huston, John Steinbeck or Pablo Picasso.

In Paris, in 1947, Capa founded the Magnum photo agency along with Henri Cartier Bresson, David Seymour “Chim” and George Rodger. On May 25th 1954, aged forty, he was killed when he stepped on a landmine while in Vietnam doing a report for Life magazine. The exhibition This is War! Robert Capa at Work is completed with a sizeable assortment of documents (magazines and letters) that help to contextualize his work and to understand the echo it had in the press of the time. At the same time, the MNAC also presents Gerda Taro, an exhibition that highlights this photographer’s outstanding role in the history of war photography and shows the influence she exerted over the work of her lover, Robert Capa.

The Mexican Suitcase
Robert Capa left Paris in 1939, leaving behind him the war and a suitcase containing 126 rolls of film negatives. These contained thousands of photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour “Chim” from May 1936 to March 1939, and a few that Fred Stein had taken in the French capital. The material was regarded as lost until it resurfaced in Mexico in 1995 and, after numerous ups and downs, the negatives reached the ICP in New York in 2007. Some of the material from the “Mexican Suitcase” is now being presented at the MNAC. It includes an unpublished image and 3 contact sheets of one of Capa’s most dramatic and famous series, taken at the Battle of the River Segre in November 1938. The most prestigious magazines of the time, like Life, Regards or Picture Post, devoted many pages and much praise to these photographs. Also on show are two new images of Gerda Taro taken near Segovia, a few weeks before she was killed, during the republican offensive that their friend Hemingway was later to immortalize in For Whom the Bell Tolls.