Robert Capa: the true picture

In Ruth Orkin's photograph of him, Robert Capa looks like a real charmer, with an easy, genuine smile, but he regards the lens through narrowed eyes, as if to say: Don't think you'll catch me off-guard. That was in 1952, just two years before his death, and at that stage of his life no one was better qualified to understand the power of the photographic image.

His birth name was Endre Friedman. Robert Capa was a persona he invented. In time he became that persona; the image became the reality. As Capa he had travelled the world and covered one war after another. Covered them, as well, in a way that lived up to his own dictum: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough".

He was in Spain during the Civil War, in China during the Japanese invasion, with the Allies in Italy, France and Germany, and he was there at the founding of the state of Israel. His photographs from all of these conflicts have a freshness and immediacy that is, even now, jarring. They are all included in the stunning retrospective of his work at the Gallery of Photography (with the enlightened sponsorship of Esso Ireland). And, of course, Capa's last war is there as well: the final act of the Vietnamese war against the French in Indochina.

Working in Japan in 1954, he agreed to replace Life magazine's photographer in Vietnam for a month. By the time he got there Dienbienphu had fallen. He went to the next hot spot, the Red River Delta. When the column he was travelling with was halted, he decided to accompany a group of soldiers fanning out across a field beside the road. He took some photographs of the troops strolling, apparently unconcerned, ahead of him, then he stepped on a land mine. It killed him immediately. He was only 40 years old.

He had crammed an exceptional amount of experience into his life. Born in Budapest, when still in his teens he had to leave Hungary, then under the dictatorial regime of Admiral Horthy, because of his leftist leanings. Working as a darkroom assistant in Berlin, he began taking photographs. When Hitler assumed dictatorial powers in 1933, Capa realised he had to get out, quickly, and, after a summer back home, went to Paris.

As an impoverished freelance, he shared a darkroom with Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour, known as Chim. There, in embryonic form, was the renowned Magnum agency they eventually helped to set up in 1946. He also met Gerda Taro, a young German photographer. They became lovers, and she set about organising his professional life. He and Taro dreamed up a dashing American photographer whose name was Robert Capa, and they passed off Friedman's photographs as Capa's. When they were rumbled, Friedman simply became Capa.

His pictures of political events in Paris established his reputation and when civil war broke out in Spain he and Taro went to cover it. Capa was back in Paris, however, when Taro was travelling in a car that was accidentally crushed by a Government tank in the chaos of a retreat. She died from her injuries. Friends say that he never really got over losing her. He went to visit his parents, now in New York, and with the filmmaker Joris Ivens travelled on to China, where nationalist and communist Chinese were united against the invading Japanese.

From the first, Capa's photographs lack Cartier-Bresson's sheer professional polish. They have a rougher, more haphazard look. But that is largely the source of their enduring power. Cartier-Bresson's mastery of the "decisive moment" produced poised, elegant, perfect images and a style that became pretty much universal. Capa's more fragmentary, uneasy take on things is closer to contemporary thinking on the limitations of photography. Even the comparatively recent suggestion that one of his most famous images, evidently capturing the death of a Loyalist militiaman during the Spanish Civil War, was effectively staged (it's still a powerful photograph), didn't really damage the status of his reportage work - the vast bulk of which is clearly not contrived.

When the Germans invaded France, the US became his base. He covered a Mexican presidential campaign, crossed the Atlantic with an American convoy and worked in Britain. Then he joined the Italian campaign before, famously, going ashore with the first wave of American troops in a landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Spielberg's invasion footage in Saving Private Ryan is indebted to the unique atmosphere of Capa's few surviving photographs of the landing. Here we learn they are so few not because, as was claimed, of water damage, but because a technician back in London almost destroyed the whole film by accident.

After the war Capa was restless. He flirted with the movie business but decided against it. He undertook various assignments, socialised a great deal, gambled, co-founded Magnum, covered developments in the fledgling Israeli state. But he seemed to have settled, more or less, in Paris when he took up the fateful offer to take pictures in Japan.

"Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," Cary Grant once remarked. "Even I want to be Cary Grant." Endre Friedman clearly wanted to be Robert Capa, and he turned out to be a brilliant Robert Capa. He was a natural as the sophisticated globe-trotter with friends in every city, the peerless professional, the living embodiment of the Hemingway ideal of grace under pressure.

Irwin Shaw's description rings entirely true when he says that Capa's guiding principle was to "remain debonair" under even the most terrible circumstances. "It means that one must never seem weary, one must always be ready to go to the next bar or to the next war."

Robert Capa/Photographs, continues at the Gallery of Photography until Jan 2nd, 1999. (The exhibition is closed December 25th, 26th and January 1st).