Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944, approximately 6:30 AM. Robert Capa wades ashore from a Higgins boat in the first wave at the Easy Red sector with the 16th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. He is carrying two Contax 35mm rangefinder cameras, a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex around his neck, and four canisters of unexposed Kodak Super-XX film in waterproof pouches inside his jacket. The German MG-42 machine guns in the bunkers above the beach are firing at the men around him at a rate of approximately twelve hundred rounds per minute. He spends roughly ninety minutes on the beach. He shoots four rolls of film, one hundred and six exposures total. He then catches a return Higgins boat and ships the rolls to the Life magazine London office. By the time the rolls arrive, the men he was photographing alongside are mostly dead. The photographs he took that morning have already entered the history of how the twentieth century looks. He is thirty years old. This is the story of how he got to the beach, and what his work changed about the camera.
Endre Friedmann Becomes Robert Capa
Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann on October 22, 1913, in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish tailoring family. He became politically active at sixteen, attending socialist meetings and distributing leaflets. He was arrested briefly by Admiral Horthy’s secret police in 1931 for left-wing organizing and was advised by family friends to leave the country before more serious charges arrived. He fled to Berlin at seventeen.
In Berlin he studied at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik and worked as a darkroom assistant at Dephot, the Berlin photo agency run by Simon Guttmann. His first major published assignment was photographing Leon Trotsky speaking to a Danish student audience in Copenhagen in November 1932. The photographs appeared in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and announced him as a working photojournalist at the age of nineteen.
He fled Berlin for Paris in early 1933 within weeks of Hitler taking power. In Paris he met Gerda Pohorylle, a German-Jewish refugee from Stuttgart with similar political views and similar professional ambitions, in late 1934. They became partners in life and work within months.
In 1935, the pair invented a persona to sell their photographs at higher prices: an imaginary American photographer named Robert Capa who was wealthy enough to charge premium rates and exotic enough to interest French editors. The persona worked. By the end of 1935, Endre Friedmann had legally adopted the Capa name. Pohorylle adopted Gerda Taro at the same time.
Spain and the Falling Soldier
The Spanish Civil War, from July 1936 to April 1939, was where modern war photography was invented. Capa and Taro arrived in Spain in August 1936, traveling with Republican units across Aragon and then south to Cordoba.
On September 5, 1936, near Cerro Muriano on the Cordoba front, Capa took the photograph that would define his career and the genre. A Republican militiaman, identified decades later as Federico Borrell García, falls backward at the moment of being shot, his arms thrown out and his rifle dropping from his hand. The image was published in Vu magazine in Paris on September 23, 1936, and in Life on July 12, 1937. Its authenticity has been debated for ninety years. The most recent scholarship suggests the photograph was taken during a training exercise rather than during active combat. The photograph’s effect on war photography as a form was independent of those questions. War photographers since 1936 have been measured against it.
Gerda Taro was killed near Brunete on July 26, 1937, run over by a Republican tank during a chaotic retreat. She was twenty-six years old. She is generally credited as the first woman photojournalist killed in combat. Capa was in Paris when she died. He never fully recovered.
The Leica and the New Photography
The technical shift that made combat photography possible. The 35mm rangefinder camera (Leica and Contax were the leading brands) became commercially mature by the early 1930s. The cameras were small enough to carry in a coat pocket, fast enough to shoot one-thirtieth of a second handheld, and used standard 35mm motion picture film stock that was cheap, abundant, and processed in standard cinema labs.
A working photojournalist could carry three cameras, twenty rolls of film, and a light meter in a single shoulder bag and operate for a full week in the field without resupply. The previous generation of press photographers had worked with five-by-seven Speed Graphic press cameras that required reloading after every single exposure. The 35mm Leica was a different category of tool.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, working in Paris in the same circles as Capa, articulated the new aesthetic with the phrase “the decisive moment,” meaning the single instant within an unfolding event when composition and meaning coincide. Life magazine launched in November 1936 and Picture Post in October 1938. Both were built around the photo essay as a journalistic form, with multiple images on a single subject and minimal text. The photojournalist as a recognizable profession with a recognizable byline emerged within those two magazines, in the same decade the equipment became light enough to carry into a war zone.
Omaha Beach
The morning of June 6, 1944. Capa was attached to the 16th Regimental Combat Team of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division for the Normandy invasion. He had specifically requested first-wave assignment after months of negotiating with Life‘s editors and the Army public affairs office.
He landed in the first wave at the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach at approximately 6:30 AM and spent ninety minutes on the beach under sustained machine gun fire from the German bunkers above. He shot four rolls of film, totaling one hundred and six exposures, working from behind beach obstacles and crawling between the steel hedgehogs that had been placed in the surf to disable landing craft. He then caught a return boat to a transport ship and sent the rolls back to the Life London office for processing.
A young darkroom assistant in London, identified in most accounts as Dennis Banks, accidentally turned the heat too high in the film drying cabinet that evening. The emulsion on three and a half of the four rolls melted. Eleven exposures survived from the entire morning.
Life published the surviving photographs in its June 19, 1944 issue under the title “Beachheads of Normandy.” The eleven images, with their pronounced motion blur and partial damage from the heat, established the visual grammar of WWII combat photography. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) modeled its opening Omaha Beach sequence directly on the Capa photographs, frame by frame in several specific shots.
The Women Who Ran Toward the War
The other photographers in the field with Capa. Margaret Bourke-White, born in the Bronx in 1904, became the first accredited female war correspondent in U.S. military history in 1942, flew on a B-17 bombing raid over Tunis in January 1943, and photographed the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Her images of the inmates standing behind barbed wire became some of the foundational evidence of the Holocaust in American public consciousness. The photographs ran in Life the following month.
Lee Miller, born Elizabeth Miller in Poughkeepsie in 1907 and a Vogue cover model in the 1920s, became a war correspondent for British Vogue in 1944. She photographed at Dachau on April 30, 1945, the day after its liberation, and the same evening was photographed by her partner David E. Scherman bathing in Adolf Hitler’s tub in the Führer’s private Munich apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz, hours after his suicide in Berlin. The photograph showed her combat boots placed on the white bathmat, leaving a smear of Dachau mud across it.
George Rodger, a British photographer, was the first journalist to enter Bergen-Belsen after its liberation on April 15, 1945. The photographs he took there caused him such lasting trauma that he stopped photographing war for the rest of his life and spent the following decades working on long-form documentary projects in Africa instead.
Magnum Photos
The cooperative. In April 1947, Capa convened Henri Cartier-Bresson, David “Chim” Seymour, George Rodger, and William and Rita Vandivert at the Penthouse Restaurant on the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The group agreed to form a photographer-owned cooperative agency in which member photographers retained the copyright to their own images, controlled the use of their work, and shared the agency’s operating costs and profits.
The structure was unprecedented. Until 1947, photojournalists had worked for magazines and agencies that owned the resulting photographs outright. The photographer was paid for the assignment but had no claim on the negatives or any subsequent reproduction. Magnum reversed the relationship.
The agency opened offices in Paris and New York within months. Within a decade, Magnum had become the most prestigious photo agency in the world and the de facto credentialing body of serious photojournalism. The photographers who matter most in twentieth-century documentary work (Eve Arnold, Werner Bischof, Elliott Erwitt, Susan Meiselas, Sebastião Salgado, James Nachtwey, Steve McCurry, many others) have largely been Magnum photographers at some point in their careers. The agency still operates from its original cities.
Closing
Capa was killed by an anti-personnel landmine on May 25, 1954, near Thai Binh in the Red River Delta of what was then French Indochina, while covering the closing weeks of the First Indochina War for Life. He was forty years old.
He had been photographing a French Army advance through paddy fields when he stepped off the marked path to get a better angle on a column of soldiers crossing a dike. The Leica he had been using was found beside his body, with the last frame he ever exposed still in the camera. The frame showed soldiers walking through tall grass.
His brother Cornell Capa founded the International Center of Photography in New York in 1974 in his memory, as a permanent home for the kind of work Robert had done. The ICP has remained the central American institution for photojournalism since.
Every conflict-zone photograph made since 1945 is in conversation with Capa, whether or not the photographer making it knows the lineage. The Vietnam work of Tim Page and Larry Burrows, the Bosnia work of Gilles Peress, the Iraq photographs of Lynsey Addario, the Ukraine work of Mstyslav Chernov all carry the same fundamental claim Capa was the first to make on a beach in Normandy. The 1920s photography piece argued that the studio invented modern beauty. The 1940s photography piece argues that the beach invented modern witness. Both arguments are still in force.