ROBERT CAPA (Hungary-U.S.A., 1913-1954)
Luminous pleating
The thirties are not exclusively centred on the recession and the famine
in certain US states, the end of the great seism of traditional representation
of the three former decades and the streamlining of styling. It is also the
sudden rise of Hitler and Mussolini, the wars of Spain and Ethiopia, preludes
to the Second World War and its aftermath until the Korea and Vietnam wars. A
new path was opening in photography. The latter now had an optic, chemistry and
evermore performing cameras to follow rapid actions.
War photographers also had to find formulas to transform the instant in
moment. But it could not be Cartier-Bresson’s ‘tukHè’. We witnessed the
apparition of Hoffmann’s propaganda, McCullin’s picturesque, Eugene Smith’s
explosive distinctness, and particularly Baltermants’ ‘figural’ epic at the
measure of the Russian steppe combats in 1941-42. There was also a completely
improbable solution, which consisted of placing oneself within or without good
and evil, out of step of any current reference system. This was the inscription
of the event in the universal pleating of a light that was both tender and
generalizing; beyond life and death. Robert Capa’s photographic subject.
The posthumous Images of War, dated 1964, translated into Images de
guerre by Hachette
(IG), skimming over the twenty years covering 1936 to 1954 – from the
year when Robert Capa ceases to be André Friedman to the year when he jumps on
a North Vietnam landmine – is one of humanity’s greatest books. To an
extent where we feel uneasy discussing it. We shall therefore content ourselves
with juxtaposing certain astonishments and exclamations.
Spain 1936 (*IG, 34-35) – the dead are back in the landscape against
which they stood for a moment. They have rejoined the eternity of their
mountains, with which they now share the shapes and the tranquillity. The tree
that has been exfoliated by the bomb indicates how we reached that point.
Halfway between the virtual eternity of the geology and the transitivity of
human bodies, military milestones erect their intermediary, secular longevity,
that of the great signs systems. Hugging the pleats of the mountain, the
clothes, the bodies, the light – which itself is pleated – appeases
every detail, creating relays of the unanimous vastness. The frame does not
index anything; it is a simple physical cessation of what goes over its edge.
However, despite the richness of the contents, there are no internal
multi-frames like we find in Adams’ work; the pleating unifies. An attentive
and detached moment-state of universe.
Italy 1944 (PHPH, 91; IG, 80-81) – the Italian peasant leans and rests
on the ground, his ground, resuming it. His upright stick hugs the folds of the
ground so well that the hill itself designates the fleeing enemy, hunting it
down. The two glances following the stick confirm that the frame is only the indicium of a fortuitous cessation, not an index that would break the luminous
pleating of things including this, what we see, is merely a relay. The
movements of the clothes support the general pleating.
Germany 1945 (**IG, 149) – an American soldier has just been
killed before the Armistice. The pleats of light fall from the trees to the
clothes before reaching the puddle of blood. The metal balustrade works the
non-scene, and on the wardrobe door, the lozenge of the wooden crest responds
decoratively to the thick spot of blood that becomes a coat of arms. The
photographer thought that this photograph would not be published, as it was
handed in long after the war. This unnecessary photograph responds to the
uselessness of war, he says. The conclusion of the text is cosmologic and
devoid of bitterness: ‘Bah! The survivors will soon forget!’ It is undoubtedly to
the honour of the great reportage magazines that blossomed just before the Second
World War that these photographs – which are everything but anecdotic, escaping
so much every warmongering or pacifist declaration of propaganda or
sentimentality – managed to be published, thereby commercialized by the
press for a wide audience. Here, we find no current psychology, no sociology of
everyday life, not even a scientific or poetic anthropology. We only find the
situation of mankind and the world in one extremity (that of war) supposing
– to be grasped-constructed – that someone was sufficiently present
and absent, there and elsewhere, now and never or forever, mixing tenderness
and the implacable calculation to circulate with the same nerve through the
solitary death of the battlefields, the offices of the Magnum agency –
founded in 1947 – and the dazzling nights of Paris and other cities.
Of course ‘that’ – like any other photograph – ‘was’ never
either. It is – accordingly to the words of Stieglitz, Ansel Adams (and
Claudel) – a question of equivalences. John Steinbeck, the long-time
companion, is unequivocal: ‘He created a world, Capa’s world’. Steinbeck is
even more enlightening when he adds ‘He could photograph thoughts’. Not his
thought. Not their thought (those who were shot). The thought. When Capa said:
‘Ten years from now, witnesses will be able to say: this is how it was’, he was
selling his product, like he could do so well.
To obtain the luminous pleating by which the famous Spanish fighter,
shot at close range in his fall is simultaneously a striking and an apotheosis
(IG, 22-23), he had – in an echo to William J. Newton’s ‘little out of
focus’ – to put himself slightly out of focus, title of his 1947 autobiography.
He also had to capture war as a process, perhaps a fundamental process;
according to the title of his last publication, Death in the Making dated 1937. In any case, Capa shares several traits with Atget: the division of light, the opened
horizontality, the indicium-frame, the absence of any apparent rhetoric. Atget did not reinforce his prints, and Capa’s photos of The Landing at Normandy (PHPH, p. 43), which were mishandled when developed, encourage us to remember that the luck we call Reality is only ever a reflection of the Real, or in the Real. The destiny of Capa’s photographs in print confirmed their nature: whilst they were outrageously cropped, the Images of War preserve their miracle through the pleating of grey, whilst the others, which were not cropped but which flattened the blacks, are merely anecdotes.
To accomplish his legend, he who used to say that he always
instinctively felt where he needed to stand to rub shoulders with death without
dying or to obtain an order, ended up stepping on a landmine in North Vietnam.
In 1937, Gerda Taro, his unforgettable photographer friend, stayed behind in
Spain, crushed by a tank. Amateurs of psychological equations will attribute
his invading warmth and his ‘slightly out of’ to the Jewish milieu he came from
and his taste for imponderability (almost Kertészian) to his Hungarian origins.
They will add that the combined warmth and imponderability is in fact
tenderness and humour. And that the generalized luminous pleat is tenderness
that became transcendental. For his funeral, his friends felt they had reached
the right note in the Quaker rite.
photos © Robert Capa / Magnum.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
PHPH: Philosophy of Photography.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.