His most famous phrase reads "If your photographs aren't good enough, it's because you're not close enough" and it has been around the world. Who pronounced it was the war photographer Robert Capa – pseudonym of Endre Friedmann, invented in 1936 together with his partner Gerda Taro – one of the greatest reporters of the twentieth century, who brought his camera to know and pass on to posterity some of the bloodiest conflicts of the past century.
The exhibition has over 100 black and white images taken by the photographer during his period of activity between 1936 and 1954 when, in Indochina, he lost his life due to a landmine. The exhibition takes place at the Mole Vanvitelliana of Ancona until next time 2nd June and divided into 13 sections and ends with the section "Gerda Taro and Robert Capa" made up of three shots: a portrait of Robert, a portrait of Gerda taken by Robert and their "double portrait", a way to show the their human story and their relationship.
By eliminating the barriers between photographer and subject, his works tell of the suffering, misery, chaos and cruelty of war. The shots, which have become iconic – just think of the only (professional) photographs of the Normandy landing by American troops on June 6, 1944 – portray five major world conflicts of the XNUMXth century, of which Capa was an eyewitness.
Robert Capa together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David “Chim” Seymour and William Vandivert founded the Magnum photographic agency in 1947. Before approaching photography, Robert Capa's dream was to become a writer, but the working at a photographic studio in Berlin brings him closer to the world of images, where he collaborates with the photojournalistic agency Dephot under the influence of Simon Guttmann. From them he receives his first assignment in Copenhagen in 1932 for the Trotsky conference. In 1933 he left Germany for France due to the advent of Nazism (Capa was of Jewish origins), but in France he encountered difficulties in finding work as a freelance photographer. From 1936 to 1939 he was in Spain, where he documents the horrors of the civil war, together with his young partner Gerda Taro and the moment in which the character whose historical memory will remain imperishable is invented.
Robert Capa will travel to China for the resistance against the Japanese invasion in 1938, then to London in 1943 and later to North Africa. He will then follow the landing of the allies in Sicily. The most famous event in Robert's photographic history Capa is the Normandy landings on D-Day. The exhibition then presents the liberation of Paris in 1944, the invasion of Germany in 1945, the trip to the Soviet Union in 1947, the official foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 and finally his last assignment in Indochina in 1954.
