Rare Capa photos go on display
EUROPE DEBUT: Exhibit focuses on the legendary war photographer’s colour work taken in peacetime
BUDAPEST, Hungary — Rarely seen colour photographs by Robert Capa, the legendary Hungarian photographer best known for his battlefield pictures from the Spanish Civil War and D-Day, are being shown for the first time in Europe at the Budapest institution which bears his name.
Capa, born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, began experimenting with colour photography in 1938 and it soon became an integral, though seldom published, part of his work. He always carried two cameras, one loaded with colour film, the other with black and white.
“This allows a very good comparison and how he approaches colour photography in a totally different manner,” said Istvan Viragvolgyi, deputy director of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center. “He turns his camera in other directions, looking for themes where colour really adds a lot to it.”
The exhibit containing 136 colour photographs, as well as film and sound recordings of Capa, runs until Sept. 20 and was first shown last year in New York, at the International Center of Photography founded by Cornell Capa, Robert’s late brother.
Consisting mostly of photos taken in peacetime, it includes pictures for a 1947 magazine feature about the Soviet Union written by John Steinbeck; Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles and Ingrid Bergman on location; a series on post-Second World War youth called Generation X, a term often attributed to Capa; Israel soon after its 1948 creation; and playful images of Pablo Picasso rejected by a magazine in favour of similar pictures in black and white.
“He is one of the most humanist photographers who worked on the battlefields,” said Zoltan Szalay, an award-winning Hungarian photographer.
Some of the originals in the collection of 4,200 colour slides had faded over the decades and were digitally restored.
“We can see how easily he adapted the new techniques and immediately delved into colour photography,” Viragvolgyi said. “He did not hesitate. He always went forward.”
For Viragvolgyi, Capa’s legacy for photographers revolves around his continual renewal, which “is needed not only today but was indispensable already 70 years ago.”
Capa was killed by a landmine in 1954 while covering the Indochina War in what is now Vietnam.