Robert Capa

In 1934, Robert Capa met and fell in love with a German Jewish refugee named Gerda Pohorylle. She later changed her name to Gerda Taro. She was killed during a battle in Madrid and this loss broke him and he never married.

In 1943 he met a lady named Elaine Justin, who was already married to the actor John Justin. They became involved in a relationship but broke up in 1945.

Later on he started dating actress Ingrid Bergman and went to Hollywood with her. There he worked for American International Pictures for some time. But they parted ways when he left for Turkey in 1946.

Robert Capa was born as Endre Friedmann on October 22, 1913 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. His parents, Dezso and Julia Friedmann were Jewish tailors.

In 1931, a group of socialists, artists, photographers and intellectuals inspired him to participate in the demonstration against the Miklos Horthy regime. The Hungarian secret police arrested him and released him on the condition that he would leave the country immediately.

He moved to Berlin, Germany, and started studying journalism at the German Political College, but then the Nazi party implemented laws that restricted Jews from going to college.

Robert Capa wished to be a writer, but he got a photographer's job and eventually he started liking it. His first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making the 'Meaning of the Russian Revolution' speech at Copenhagen in 1932.

In 1933 he moved to France as the Jewish journalists and photographers were being persecuted in Germany with the rise of Nazism.

He photographed the Spanish Civil War along with Gerda Taro and David Seymour from 1936 to 1939. While fleeing Europe in 1939, Capa lost some part of this collection, which resurfaced decades later in 1990 in Mexico City.

In 1936, he became globally renowned for his 'Falling Soldier' photograph taken at the Cordoba Front, where a loyalist militiaman had been shot and was in the act of falling to his death. A photograph with such dexterity became controversial and its authenticity was doubted.

In 1938, he went to Hankow (now Wuhan) in China to document their resistance against the Japanese invasion and moved to New York City before the beginning of the World War II. During the war, he worked for ‘Collier's Weekly’ and ‘Life’ magazine.

During the Allied invasion in 1944, he was with the first wave of American troops on Omaha Beach that faced the heaviest resistance from German troops in the Atlantikwall bunkers. Capa took a total of 106 pictures but only 11 survived after a photo lab accident in London.

Capa went to the Soviet Union in 1947 with his American-writer friend John Steinbeck, whose journal 'A Russian Journal' (1948) was illustrated with Capa's photos. The photos were taken in Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and the ruins of Stalingrad.

His most famous images are 'The Magnificent Eleven', a group of photographs taken on D-Day (June 6, 1944).