Capa Center opens photo exhibition

Photographer Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, May 1937. (Photo: Gerda Taro / Wikimedia Commons)

“Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann, October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954) is considered the unique visual chronicler of several 20th century wars (the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, the First Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War) both in the world and the Hungarian history of photography,” the website of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center says of the Hungarian photographer, who covered five wars directly from the battlefield, making his mark in photography in the course of a tragically short life.

Via the photographs purchased in 2008, Budapest has become one of the most important safe-keepers of the Capa estate besides New York and Tokyo, the Capa Center notes. The series entitled Master’s Set III, presenting the life of Robert Capa, includes 937 enlargements created in the 1990s.  

The showcased selection presents close to 50 images of Capa’s oeuvre, from the photograph capturing Trotsky’s speech from one of his first assignments to a picture taken in the Indochina War. The Capa Center says its aim with the selection was to uncover the essential force of Capa’s oeuvre as a whole.

“Also, with the powerful accents of the exhibited thematic units, we would like to expose the compositional virtuosity of Robert Capa, together with the images constructed from his thorough, minute observations, and his unique capability for capturing fast-occurring actions,” the Capa Center adds.

Some 18 of the showcased photographs have been matted and framed specifically for this exhibition, so this is the first time these images from the collection of Robert Capa’s photographs held in Budapest are being presented to the public.