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“I think I’m the only one here who actually knew him,” says Andy Rooney, of 60 Minutes fame, during a members event at the ICP’s current exhibition, “This Is War! Robert Capa at Work” (organized by the late Richard Whelan). Transfixed by one of the legendary war photographer’s unflinching portraits, a small black-and-white photograph of a Chinese boy titled Child Killed While Trying to Save His Chicken and Piglet During the Battle of Tai ‘erzhuang, Xuzhou Front, April 1938, I hadn’t noticed the 88-year-old television legend standing next to me. Turning toward him, I expected to see his familiar smirk. Instead, he looked dead serious.
Capa would have been 94 had he lived to see this exhibition, and one wonders what would have happened if this charismatic, left-leaning Hungarian Jew, exiled from his homeland at the age of 17 for speaking out against the anti-Semitic government, hadn’t been killed by a land mine in Indochina in 1954 at age 40. How might he have changed the representation of war as we know it? A strident antifascist, Capa certainly didn’t believe in hiding his political sympathies: “In a war,” he famously declared, “you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what partisan tendencies goes on.” How would he have dealt with the conflicts of our own time—the bloody civil wars of Bosnia, Sudan and Rwanda, let alone Iraq and the Bush administration’s military-contracted “embedded” journalists?
Brilliantly conceived around six of the famed photojournalist’s key photo stories from the 1930s and 1940s, “This Is War!” invites these sorts of questions. It also provokes comparisons between then and now that seem especially germane in this global age of terror, offering a fresh take on four of the five wars Capa covered in his short-lived career—and the iconic images that made him a household name.
The show begins with the Spanish Civil War, where Capa and his partner Gerda Taro (a related exhibit of her work is also on view) went in 1936 to shoot everything from refugees fleeing the Nationalists to militiamen on the Cordoba Front. Capa and Taro (who died in 1937) invented the very concept of the passionate photojournalist taking risks on the battlefield. Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, or The Falling Soldier conveys this daring well, even if the famed picture from 1936 has been accused of being staged. Presented with a sequence of two preceding shots where we can see the soldier when he is first hit by gunfire, and then in the midst of crumpling to the ground, it exemplifies the serial, cinematic style that Capa would pioneer.
After Spain, Capa went to China to cover the Sino-Japanese War in 1938. His photo Boy Soldier, taken that year, made the cover of Life magazine, significantly ennobling the cause of the invaded Chinese to an otherwise ignorant American public. Shot from below, the three-quarters portrait exaggerates the statuesque stoicism of its subject while still conveying his vulnerability. Capa returned to Spain in late 1938, capturing Republican troops as they crossed the Segre River to confront Franco’s fascist forces. As the exhibition reminds us, Capa’s minute-by-minute account would never have happened without his use of the new handheld Leica camera, which allowed for such on-the-go images.
In each of the sections that make up “This Is War!,” glass vitrines display related archival material: contact sheets, film canisters, press cards, handwritten notes by Capa, and the French and American magazines (Life, Paris Match, Regards and Vu) that published his work.
In “Leipzig, 1945,” the final part of the exhibition, Capa documents the exhausted, triumphant air of American soldiers in Germany at the end of World War II. One famous image that would grace another Life cover shows a young U.S. soldier enacting a mock Nazi salute. But it is Capa’s series on a platoon of American machine-gunners gathered in a cramped Leipzig apartment, and the sudden killing of one of them by a German sniper, that is truly Capa-esque. Full of the heightened drama of suspenseful waiting, it reveals the spirit of the soldiers and rebels he most identified with: the ones who stuck it out in the trenches, whatever the consequences, in the name of justice.
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