This weekend’s New York Times Art & Design section features a story about the long lost negatives of Robert Capa.
Originally thought to have been lost or destroyed, Robert Capa’s negatives from the Spanish Civil War were finally retrieved and brought back to its rightful place at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City. The ICP was founded by Cornell Capa, Robert’s brother who is also a photographer.
The negatives containing thousands of unpublished photos were all contained in 3 cardboard boxes.
The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.
Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.
Robert Capa, undoubtedly one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, helped change the way we see the effects of war by pushing photos of war into our faces. He first became famous when his photograph of the death of a loyalist soldier (seen above) became quite controversial because people thought it might have been staged. He then changed many people’s sentiments of war when his photographs of the landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day were published in LIFE magazine.
Later, Capa would found Magnum Photos with several other prominent photographers. Today, Magum Photos still stands as one of the best group of photojournalists around.
But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons. This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever…
His mantra, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”, is one of the things I think about most when composing a photograph. And at art school, Capa is somewhat of a visionary when it comes to the foundations of our photographic field of work, so it’s exciting to see this story development in real time. I expect ICP to put some of this work on display at some point after they’ve cataloged everything (which could take some time).
It’s also interesting to note that the famed photograph of the death of the loyalist soldier could very well be a photograph by one of Capa’s partners, Gerda Taro, who worked closely with Capa on many of their projects. Only time will tell if they find the actual negative to that photograph with the written credits near it. In a sense, this newly recovered box of negatives is turning the world of photography on its head!
i think that Capa’s work is phenomenal and he deserves all the credit. i admire his passion for photojournalism because it takes alot of guts for sum1 to actually want to risk their life for a photo that may not mean anything to him but means an awful lot to others.