Robert Capa

André Friedmann, alias Robert Capa, was born into a Hungarian Jewish family. He studied political science in Berlin and found his first job as an apprentice developer in a photo agency. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, he went into exile in Paris. 

The young man struggled to get his photography career off the ground. In 1935, his lover Gerda Taro had the idea of crediting his photos with the name Robert Capa and promoting him to newspapers as a chic and sophisticated American reporter. During this period, Robert Capa worked for the Alliance-Photo agency and in 1936 took a photo of the Popular Front that made the cover of VU magazine and brought him fame. 

The reporter went on to cover, often for Life magazine, the major conflicts of his time: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1938), the Second World War, and the Indochina War (1954). The photograph ‘Death of a Republican Soldier’ and the ‘D-Day’ series on the Normandy landings, where he was the only photographer among the American soldiers, earned Capa the reputation as the greatest photojournalist of all time. 

In 1947, along with David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others, Robert Capa founded the first photographic cooperative: Magnum Photos. That same year, he travelled to the USSR with the writer John Steinbeck. 

The man who had no home and lived in hotels died in 1954, at the age of 40. While covering the Indochina War alongside French soldiers, he stepped on a mine. 

(Source: polkamagazine.com)