Robert Capa

Robert Capa was a Hungarian-born photojournalist who documented the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and other conflicts. His images helped define modern war photography through their immediacy, proximity and emotional force.

Capa co-founded Magnum Photos and was killed by a land mine while covering the First Indochina War in 1954. Questions surrounding some famous images do not diminish his broad influence on photojournalism and the visual memory of war.

In John Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal, in 1947, John Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa entered the Soviet Union on assignment for the New York Herald Tribune. They travelled through Moscow, the ruined city of Stalingrad, collective farms and towns in Ukraine, and the Georgian Caucasus, seeking to record ordinary life rather than produce another abstract argument about the developing Cold War. Steinbeck’s observations and Capa’s photographs document postwar reconstruction, food shortages, agricultural work, official ceremonies, private hospitality and the limits placed on foreign visitors.