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| Photographs by Robert Capa was published by Aperture, 1998. Robert Capa was on show at the Gallery of Photography, December, 1998. |
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| Other articles by Fintan O'Toole |
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| French fishermen with the bodies of men killed during the D-Day landings, Omaha Beach, June 1944 |
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| Paris, France. 1939 |
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| The Photographer of Total War |
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| Before photography, images of war were essentially of two kinds. There were formal, heroic battle scenes, depictions of a vivid but rigidly conventional game. And there were the naive, rough-and-ready pictograms, drawn, usually by participants, as a way of recording essential information. There are exceptions to this rule - most notably Francisco Goya's great sequence The Disasters of War - but they are rare. In a sense, the arrival of photography changed not just the depiction of war but war itself. One of the condition of modern war is that it is fought, not between armies, but between populations. And one of the conditions for this kind of total war is that the whole population is brought, as it were, onto the battlefield. In reality, the battle is often taken to the houses and streets of the home front by bombers and invading armies. Less literally, but no less crucially, battles must be relayed to the folks back home by potent images of war. |
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| Robert Capa created, as this exhibition reminds us, memorable images of artists, of strikes, of night clubs and race-tracks. But it is as a war photographer that he really commands attention. People who have never heard his name could recognize his famous image of a Republican militiaman being killed during the Spanish Civil War. That war made him famous. Another war, the Vietnamese struggle against the French, led to his death in 1954. |
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| What distinguishes Capa and makes his work so resonant, however, is that he is, above all, the photographer of total war. In a sense, even when he is photographing the high life of Paris in the early 1950s, he creates post-war pictures, images whose exuberance is imbued with the afterglow of horror, whose liveliness is in direct proportion to the recent presence of death. Likewise, his stunning photographs of France in the late 1930s and of Mexico in 1940 may not be images of military conflict but they are redolent of the great social conflicts out of which wars arise. He brings exactly the same mixture of rugged immediacy and lyrical pity to election riots in Mexico City as he does to Bilbao during a fascist air-raid. |
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| Most importantly, his images of war itself are not typically images of actual fighting. The famous image of the dying militiaman in fact gives a misleading impression of the body of Capa's work. His eye is usually drawn, not to soldiers but to civilians. To the fear and grief of women and children under bombardment or at funerals. The bit lips and transfixed eyes of people in Barcelona and Hankou watching air battles. The shaved head of a woman in newly liberated Chartres who carries in her arms the baby she bore for a German invader. |
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| When he focuses on soldiers, Capa sees them, not as cogs in a war machine, but as people in disarray. They are usually being shifted to or from the front line: Chinese fighters being ferried across the Yangtse, a Spanish volunteer snatching a last moment with his girl before the evacuation of Barcelona, a wounded German being hauled away from Cherbourg in a handcart. Capa's compositions are usually intimate, but even when they have an epic scale, it is with a bitter, unheroic twist. The massive machinery of battle is generally glimpsed in the background of ordinary human disaster like the like the landing craft and barrage balloons that loom behind the faceless bodies of American troops killed in the D-Day landing. When we see troops drawn up in formal ranks, composed almost like a classical battle painting, they are miserable German prisoners, sitting in the mud, arranged in an ironic axis, their dejection mocking the apparent grandeur of the picture's geometry. |
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| What you get in these profound, oddly beautiful photographs, is nothing less than the terror and pity of the 20th century. Seen together like this, they have an impact far beyond the individual images. Because they move through Europe, Latin America and Asia, they have a breadth of vision that is rare in any body of work and that comes close to creating a portrait of modern humanity. Much more than a mere record of events, they are an event in themselves, a moment that reveals the violence, madness, tenderness and persistence of our times. |
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| Fintan O'Toole |
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