Robert Capa and Gerda Taro

[Manfred M]

I just came across this short video that is mainly about Robert Capa and his partner, Gerda Taro on the BBC website.

Capa's work has definitely had an influence on my own documentary type work.

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p096m...graphy-forever

[Tronhard]

Capa and Taro were certainly ground-breaking in their documentary and war imagery.

Capa's work is certainly not without controversy: the famous image of the dying soldier in the Spanish civil war has been accused of being staged, and even that Taro took the image and not Capa. I doubt we will ever know.

The other thing I have always found interesting is the very famous image of the Omaha landings on D-Day. Apparently Capa took several rolls of film and had them fast-tracked to his editors in London. According to LIFE editor John G. Morris, they were desperate to get the scoop with the first images of the landings and told the lab techs to fast-track the processing, but they buckled under the pressure and cooked most of the film. They salvaged only a very few images, most highly degraded, of Capa's work. Arguably the most famous one is the one I find most interesting: the image is mutilated and technically pretty awful, thanks to the damage done, yet it is considered one of the most enduring and significant images of the 20th Century:
http://100photos.time.com/photos/robert-capa-d-day

To me it reinforces the significance of the context of an image overriding the technical aspects. If that image was put in for you to judge (without prior knowledge of the history or context) it would likely get short shrift. However, given the momentous events it portrayed, and the timing, it transcends those imperfections and arguably has a metier all its own.

[Manfred M]

I have read a lot of different articles on both the dying soldier and the D-day landing images.

I did not mark down the sources, but there has been a lot of research done on both. There have been people that have identified the location where the dying soldier image was taken and have asserted it was quite far from where the battles were raging that day; somewhere in the order of 20 - 40km.

More recently I read that Capa misrepresented the number of shots he had taken that day and all of them were on those badly processed rolls.

[Tronhard]

For me, the works of Don McCullin, James Natchway, Horst Faas and Tim Heatherington, are stand outs for the quality of their work as combat photographers in later wars.

I was reading that during the American Civil War, photographers were seen as neutral and in fact welcomed into the areas of both sides as they offered the chance to have images taken and sent to loved ones. In one occasion one of the portable darkrooms, housed in a wagon, was near the field of battle. The photographer, one of the many employed by Matthew Brady, was processing his wet collodion negatives, and had an accident using the chemicals he was working with. The wagon burst into flame and soldiers from both sides ran to assist, anxious to not only save the unfortunate photographer, but assure all that they had not caused the conflagration!

These days the truth is sadly the reverse, war photographers began to be specifically targeted during the Chechen conflict to reduce the visual evidence of the atrocities occurring. In following conflicts that trend has become entrenched, not only in wars but in conflicts within civil society - such as was seen recently in the US where accredited photographers, clearly identified, were harassed, assaulted and arrested. The images of news videographers running for their lives while the mob destroyed their video equipment at the Capitol is only the latest expression of that.

[Ken MT]

Oh, what a beautiful world it has become!

[Tronhard]

I have read a lot of different articles on both the dying soldier and the D-day landing images.

I did not mark down the sources, but there has been a lot of research done on both. There have been people that have identified the location where the dying soldier image was taken and have asserted it was quite far from where the battles were raging that day; somewhere in the order of 20 - 40km.

More recently I read that Capa misrepresented the number of shots he had taken that day and all of them were on those badly processed rolls.

Hi Manfred:
I agree, and although I didn't keep the references, they suggested much the same and went on to infer that the soldier was actually training when persuaded to drop for the camera - it certainly made great propaganda!

[rpcrowe]

I enjoy biographies and especially auto biographies of famous photographers of any genre... Bob Capa's autobiography "Slightly Out Of Focus" is available from Amazon Kindle and is "IMO" good reading!

In Bob Capa's words, he was under some significant pressure at the time of the D-Day Landing and that his hands were shaking violently. He also left the beachhead earlier than anticipated...