Photographer Robert Capa was born on October 22, 1913, in Budapest, Hungary. His real name was Friedman Endre Ernö. He died on May 25, 1954. He was the second son of a Jewish family that ran a clothing salon. He was arrested in 1930 for participating in the left-wing student movement and ordered deported the following year. He then moved to Berlin and enrolled at the Hochschule für Politek. However, anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe at the time, which led to his family's salon going bankrupt. Unable to receive financial support, he eventually dropped out of school. He later worked as a darkroom technician at the photo agency Dephoto, but then went independent and moved to Paris. Around this time, Endre was dating photographer Gerda Taro. As they began working together as photojournalists, Taro suggested they use the fictitious name "Robert Capa" as their stage name. Thus, the wealthy and famous American photographer "Robert Capa" was born.
In 1936, Capa traveled to the Cordoba front to cover the Spanish Civil War. It was there that he took the famous "Falling Soldier" photograph. It's said to capture the exact moment a soldier was shot in the head, and when it was published in the American photo magazine LIFE in 1937, it instantly made Capa famous worldwide. However, during the war, Gerda was hit by a tank and killed. From then on, the name "Capa" came to refer to Endre alone.
Capa then photographed the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938 and the Normandy landings during World War II in 1943. After the war, he obtained American citizenship and founded the photography collective Magnum Photos in 1947. After that, he left the battlefield and photographed celebrities like actress Ingrid Bergman, while also reporting on the Soviet Union during the Cold War for newspapers such as the Herald Tribune.
However, when he was assigned to cover the Vietnam War in 1954, he stepped on a landmine on the battlefield and was killed. He was only 40 years old at the time.
In recent years in Japan, the Yokohama Museum of Art in Kanagawa Prefecture held the exhibition "Robert Capa/Gerda Taro: Two Photographers" in January 2013, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu, Tokyo, held the exhibition "Robert Capa at 101 Years: Everyone Admired Bob" in March 2014.
