Jewish war photographer Robert Capa's life and work honored in Budapest

Having toured the Parliament, the Gellért Thermal Bath, and the Shoes on the Danube memorial, visitors to Budapest might also want to visit The Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center on 8 Nagymező Street. Located in central Budapest near the landmark Dohány Street Synagogue, the five-floor cultural center explores the life of the Hungarian-American documentary photojournalist and war correspondent who reported from conflicts across Europe, China, Vietnam, and the nascent State of Israel.

Born Endre Ernő Friedmann to a Jewish family in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fearless photographer (1913-1954) isn’t as well known in Israel as fellow Budapest Jewish luminaries Theodor Herzl and Hannah Szenes. His tumultuous and all-too-brief life symbolizes the cosmopolitan and tragic Central European milieu of Budapest Jewry in the 20th century.

Life on the edge

More a participant than an observer, Capa lived his life on the edge and died in action. While on assignment for Life magazine, he stepped on a landmine in French Indochina in the decades-long conflict remembered by Americans and Israelis as the Vietnam War.

Arguably his most iconic photo, "The Falling Soldier," snapped on September 5, 1936, captured Republican militiaman Federico Borell Garcia in the split second he was fatally shot by Franco’s rebels in the battle of Cerro Muriano during the Spanish Civil War. Notwithstanding that some claimed the photograph was staged, it earned Capa his international reputation and became an anti-war symbol as powerful as Picasso’s painting Guernica.

Immigrants arrive at the Haifa port, ca. 1949–1950. (credit: © Robert Capa / ICP / Magnum Photos, courtesy °CLAIRbyKahn)

Another of Capa’s iconic photographs – shot with trembling hands that blurred the image – captured GI Joes storming ashore in Normandy on D-Day. He used that motif for his 1947 autobiography Slightly Out of Focus, where he wrote his often-quoted saying “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

Capa was the only civilian photographer to land at Omaha Beach. US general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1947 in acknowledgment of his photos documenting the American Army during World War II.

Capturing Ben-Gurion

The next year, 1948, Capa captured David Ben-Gurion declaring Israel’s independence at Tel Aviv’s Museum of Art.

For this reviewer, Capa’s most powerful images are his photos humanizing destitute immigrants at the Sha’ar Ha’aliya ma’abara ("transit camp") near Hadera. Another emotion-charged photo captured Holocaust survivors on board a ship docking in Haifa after statehood. Those pictures accompanied Irwin Shaw’s ‘s 1950 book Report on Israel.

As a youth, Capa was drawn to the Munkakör ("Employment Circle"), a radical Budapest-based group of socialist and avant-garde artists, photographers, and intellectuals sympathetic to Communism. In 1931, just before his first photo was published, Capa was arrested by the Hungarian secret police after participating in a demonstration against the Miklós Horthy regime. Beaten and imprisoned, he was released after a police official’s wife – who knew his family – intervened on the condition that the teenager leave the country immediately.

From Friedmann to Capa

Capa escaped with his Leica to Vienna, and later relocated to Prague. He finally settled in Berlin, where he studied political science at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, and worked part time as a darkroom assistant before becoming a staff photographer for the Dephot (Deutsche Photodienst) photographic agency.

When the Nazi regime came to power in 1933 and banned Jews from universities, the Hungarian refugee fled to Paris and then New York. In 1934, he changed his name to Robert Capa – cápa is Hungarian for “shark” – because he thought it would be easily recognizable and sounded American.

After WWII, the photojournalist settled in Paris. There, in 1947, he was among those who established the cooperative agency Magnum Photos. He became its president five years later.

The Capa Center annually awards the Robert Capa Hungarian Photography Grand Prize to an outstanding Hungarian shutterbug.