authenticity, which resulted in compelling and can-
did images that gave concrete visual expression to
war and its effects. A pacifist and anti-war advo-
cate, Capa spent much of his life and ultimately
died photographing the human and sometimes
inhuman face of the world’s conflicts.
Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann on
October 22, 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, the second
of three sons born to Dezso ̈and Julia Friedmann.
Capa became politically and socially conscious at
an early age, due in part to his contact with the
artist, poet and Socialist Lajos Kassak, whom
Capa met in 1929. Kassak exposed the young
Capa to the photographic work of several Hungar-
ian-born social documentary photographers, as
well as the important images coming out of Amer-
ica at the time by the more famous reformer-photo-
graphers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. Looking to
combine his dual interests in politics and literature,
Capa soon aspired to a career in journalism. He
also adopted many of Kassak’s reform-minded
political beliefs and sympathies as his own, and
by the age of 17 he had already participated in
several local demonstrations and marches protest-
ing governmental policies.
Capa’s burgeoning political activism led to his
more radical participation in local protests and
other forms of political agitation in Budapest
against what he viewed to be a repressive Hungar-
ian government. His enthusiasm for reform also led
him to meet briefly with a recruiter for the Hungar-
ian Communist Party, and while Capa decided not
to join the communist organization, his contact
with one of its members resulted in his arrest and
eventual expulsion from Hungary in the summer of
- Thus, Capa left his hometown of Budapest to
pursue a degree in journalism at the Deutsche
Hochschule fu ̈r Politik in Berlin, Germany.
Arriving in Berlin with minimal resources, Capa
fatefully took a job as a darkroom assistant at
Dephot, a photographic agency that at the time
represented a number of important photojourn-
alists. Dephot’s director, Simon Guttmann, took
a liking to Capa and eventually lent him an old
35-mm Leica camera to use and allowed him to
cover minor local events for the agency. The Leica
was a small, unobtrusive camera well suited for
the close-range candid photo-reportage that inter-
ested Capa, and for which he would soon become
famous. He received his first significant assign-
ment as a photojournalist in November, 1932,
when his superiors at Dephot sent to him Copen-
hagen, Denmark to cover a speech being given
there by the exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Able to smuggle his inconspicuous Leica into the
stadium and position himself near to where
Trotsky was speaking, Capa clandestinely
snapped a series of photographs that superbly
captured the energy of the impassioned Russian
orator and the drama of the moment, so much so
that Berlin’sDer Welt Spiegeldevoted a full page
to Capa’s photographs.
With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in early
1933, Capa, being both Jewish and a political
activist, left Berlin. He eventually settled in
Paris, where sometime during the spring of 1934
and after a difficult period living in near poverty
Capa met fellow Hungarian Andre ́ Kerte ́sz, a
successful art photographer and photojournalist
whose work regularly appeared in the French
magazineVu. Kerte ́sz helped the young Capa by
loaning him money, finding him work, and teach-
ing him about photography. It was also in Paris
around this time that Capa befriended David
Szymin and Henri Cartier-Bresson, two young
photographers with whom Capa would develop
lifelong personal and professional relationships.
Cultivating both his photographic skills and pro-
fessional contacts through this growing network
of photographer friends in Paris, Capa finally
began to make a name for himself as a photo-
journalist, initially through a series of well-
received photographs for the Paris paperRegards,
chronicling the political marches and strikes asso-
ciated with the leftist Popular Front campaign
leading up to the 1936 elections.
In the summer of that year, Capa took the first of
several trips to Spain with his companion Gerda
Taro to cover the civil war that had recently
erupted there. Using primarily his Leica, Capa pro-
duced a highly regarded series of photographs doc-
umenting the fighting that was taking place in
northeastern and southern Spain. And it was in
the south near the town of Co ́rdoba that Capa
snapped one of the most iconic photographs ever
taken: his famous image of a Spanish Republican
soldier at the precise moment of his death. This and
other photographs by Capa from the Spanish front
were featured in a number of large-circulation
newspapers and prestigious magazines in France
and Britain, and the American magazineLifepub-
lished a series of his images that documented the
siege of Madrid and the plight of its inhabitants.
Capa’s acclaimed photographs of the Spanish Civil
War heralded his arrival as a premier photojourn-
alist onto the world stage, and upon his return to
Paris he published a book of his and Taro’s photo-
graphs from Spain titled Death in the Making,
which he dedicated to Taro, who had died while
covering the conflict.CAPA, ROBERT