Up close and personal

An exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Robert Capa’s work looks at the patterns in the legendary photojournalist’s pictures.

By CARL HOFFMAN
Nuremberg, Germany, 1945 (photo credit: TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART)
Nuremberg, Germany, 1945
(photo credit: TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART)
Robert Capa was a giant in the field of photojournalism.
His combat photographs vividly documented five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and the war that ended French colonialism in Indochina. His Spanish Civil War photograph of a soldier falling in battle – taken from a vantage point just a few feet away – has become an iconic war photo, among the most famous in the history of the genre. His pictures of war’s aftermath, especially those of a Europe in ruins at the end of World War II, are among the strongest antiwar statements of the 20th century.
Describing the “art” of photojournalism, Capa famously said, “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Capa lived by this maxim from the moment he took his first news photo, of Leon Trotsky in 1932, to his last, on May 25, 1954, when he strayed away from a protected convoy to get a closer picture and stepped on a land mine near the village of Thai Binh in Vietnam.
A fascinating collection of Capa’s photographs is on display at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in an exhibition entitled “Robert Capa: Photographer of Life.” The exhibition consists of more than 50 Capa photographs, along with a documentary film, Robert Capa: In Love and War, shown continuously in a corner of the gallery.
“The exhibition is made from our collection of prints,” says curator Raz Samira, a 10-year staff member of the museum’s Department of Photography.
“We have around 150 prints of photographs he took in Israel when he was here in 1948-1950. It was the first two years of the country, and he was everywhere – Haifa, Beersheba, Tel Aviv, all the kibbutzim, in Jerusalem, of course, and the army. He was everywhere, from Tel Aviv cafés to the ma’abarot, the transit camps for new immigrants. In addition to those, we also have many of his international prints of photographs that he took all over the world.”
Capa’s interest and two-year presence in Israel should perhaps come as no surprise. The man we know as Robert Capa essentially invented himself in Paris at the age of 22. Born Endre Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest, he was arrested at age 17 on suspicion of political activity against regent Miklós Horthy. Upon his release he went to Berlin, where he worked as a darkroom assistant. With the rise of the Nazis in 1933, he fled to Paris – with a camera and little else – and adopted the name Robert Capa. He soon began working as a freelance photographer, drawn particularly to the tumultuous political events and early winds of war in Europe. Throughout his short life, Capa continued to base himself in Paris but traveled around the world from one war to the next. Capa returned briefly to Budapest at the end of World War II, saw the results of the Holocaust in Hungary and was deeply, personally affected by the murder of family and friends. Capa went to Mandate Palestine in 1948, a committed Zionist.
The exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art covers the full spectrum of Capa’s photographic career, but in a rather unusual way.
Says Samira, “Our previous Robert Capa exhibition, in 1988, was chronological and didactic. The curator of that exhibition attempted to present a history of Capa’s work, from his early photos to the end of his life. For me, though, what was important was not the places and the periods but the motifs, shapes, ideas and composition. If we look through Capa’s pictures, we see moments that seem to repeat themselves throughout all of the places and all of the times.”
To illustrate her point, Samira indicates a photo of Yemenite immigrants in a transit camp tent in Israel, and then a photo of a makeshift lean-to full of refugees in war-torn China. The viewer is struck by the observation that they are almost the same picture, when looked at in terms of composition, lines, light, color and emotion.
“When I saw this, I was unable to simply redo the idea of the previous show,” she says.
Samira then points out a picture of an elderly man in bombed-out postwar Berlin, next to a picture of an elderly man in front of bombed-out buildings in postwar London. The pictures were taken around the same time. Both men are about the same age, and they both seem to have pretty much the same attitude: “The world has gone to hell, but I’m still here, trying to be the person I have always been.” Previously on opposing sides of the war and separated by hundreds of miles, both men are struggling to maintain their identities in a world now in ashes and rubble.
“So this is the idea of the show,” Samira says. “I’ve ‘confused’ places and times, and I tried to feel Capa’s feelings and see his world through his eyes. Doing it this way, I think we’re better able to appreciate his genius and understand why he was one of the greatest photojournalists of all times.”
Samira’s vision and curatorial judgment become even clearer as we move through the exhibition. We see, for example, an interesting triptych of photographs – one of many displayed in Israeli fashion from right to left – of Leon Trotsky addressing a crowd in Copenhagen, of David Ben-Gurion proclaiming the State of Israel before a crowd in Tel Aviv, and a young Menachem Begin galvanizing a crowd of supporters somewhere in Israel. In what was perhaps a bit of whimsy, Capa frames Ben-Gurion under a portrait of Theodor Herzl and near an Orthodox rabbi in the audience. Both Herzl in the portrait and the rabbi in the audience appear to have identical beards.
Says Samira, “When I saw these patterns, I couldn’t separate them into a chronology as is usually done – chronologically, didactic. This is not a history show. Everything here is connected to each other in other ways. I hadn’t seen it before; but when I did, it was a revelation.
We have pictures in this exhibition of crowds – crowds in France, in Spain, in Moscow. But in a way, it’s all the same crowd, appearing in different pictures. The motif is the same.”
Looking at another three pictures, of people moving around a bombed-out Stalingrad, a war-ravaged China and an utterly destroyed Berlin, we nonetheless see a destroyed world trying to struggle back to life, like the first blades of grass sprouting through the charred ground in a burnt-out forest. Samira says that if we understand the message of this triptych of photos, we can understand the whole exhibition.
“This is what I’m trying to say here.
I call this exhibition ‘Photographer of Life.’ Capa loved life. Even when he photographed war, he focused on the smaller human parts of it, such as a soldier bringing water to another soldier.”
She then points out a picture of two people caring for each other in an Israeli immigrant transit camp in 1949, helping each other to adapt and survive; next to two wounded Spanish Civil War soldiers leaning on each other as they hobble down a road; next to a picture of a couple in Sicily 1947, also dragging each other down a road.
Opposite this on another wall is another pair, an elderly couple calmly and warmly having tea together in a London bomb shelter during the Blitz. All these photos are images of people quietly triumphing over tragedy.
The exhibition does have its darker moments, however. We see a story told, in three consecutive photographs, of a Paris crowd cheering at being liberated from the Nazis; a woman – presumably an accused collaborator – being brought to a courtyard already littered with shaved hair; and then the shaved, humiliated woman being paraded along a Paris street, holding a baby, as crowds taunt her and jeer. We see gripping pictures of the D-day Invasion of Normandy, the last American soldier to be killed in Europe before Germany’s surrender and, of course, Capa’s iconic photograph of the Spanish Civil War soldier at the moment of his battlefield death.
As we contemplate the artistry of Capa’s photography, I observe that today virtually everyone has a smartphone camera in his or her pocket that is capable of taking better photographs than the cameras Capa was using in the 1930s and ‘40s. I ask Samira if these cameras make people better photographers.
She immediately replies, “No. It makes photography more popular but not necessarily better. It advances technique but not art. Technique and art are two different things. You can be very good at technique, but if you don’t have something inside that you can express and show, some vision or idea, then it’s not art. It’s nice to show your friends, but if you don’t have something special inside you, it just doesn’t work as art.”
“Robert Capa: Photographer of Life” is on display until August 22 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Monday, Wednesday, Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday, Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Sunday closed. For further information, call (03) 607-7020 or visit www.tamuseum.org.il.