Robert Capa, Spain, and D-Day
Robert Capa
Robert Capa’s work as a war photographer is discussed in a recent article in the “Photographers on Photography” series on the Imaging Resources website. Capa started his career in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, making headlines with his controversial photograph of the death of a Spanish Republican soldier. According to Lincoln Brigader Milt Felsen, an ambulance driver, who first met Capa in 1936:
“He’d hitch a ride to the front with me every so often, always asking where the action was. He was always there. But when I’d meet him in Madrid, he was always dressed to the nines and I never saw him without a pretty mam’selle on his arm. He was a good man.”
During the Second World War, Capa embedded himself among American troops, even landing during the first waves of assult on Omaha Beach on D-Day, taking 106 photos before returning to England to develop them and pick up more film. Though the majority of the photos were destroyed by a hasty darkroom assistant, the eight which survived have become immortalized as symbolic of the horrors of war. Capa died in 1954 after stepping on a landmine while covering France’s war in Indochina.
