The Hungarian Andre Friedmann is not a well known name in photography – but he found the way to fame. Enter stage left an American war photographer called Robert Capa!
The interesting part here is that Capa and Friedmann are one and the same people. As Robert Capa, he has been lionized and his pictures held up as shining examples of fearless photojournalism, while his alter ego Friedmann has really been forgotten without reaching any great heights.
Getting to the truth behind this strange fact brings in a third person, Gerda Pohorylles. Gerda, also known as Gerda Taro, was Andre Friedmann’s agent in his early days. It was she who decided that the market for his pictures would be much greater if the Europeans thought he was a famous American photographer, and so Robert Capa was created. Amongst the famous images from Europe are his shots of the Spanish Civil War, including the well-remembered photograph of a Spanish militiaman literally at the split second of impact, dramatically dying from a bullet. The un-named soldier was not the only one to perish in this war as poor Gerda also met her end reporting that conflict, but by that stage Andre/Robert did not need an agent.
Robert Capa of course, did eventually emigrate to America and was to accompany the American forces to Europe in 1944. His photographs of the D-Day invasion are now legendary.
He was an immensely popular figure in America and was the friend of many film stars, writers and other celebrities such as John Steinbeck and Gary Cooper.
As a photojournalist, he covered five wars in all. The Spanish Civil War, the Chinese-Japanese War, WW II in Europe, the Israeli War of Independence and the French Indo-China War. Capa was never one to photograph from well behind the lines. He shot from close to the action. His photographic rule was, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Eventually, this need to get close to the action finally killed him, when he stood on a landmine 25th May 1954 in Vietnam. It is said that his body was found still clutching his camera and the film inside was unharmed. A photographer to the very end, although I think this is an urban legend.
As well as his 70,000 photographs, Capa left the world a photographic legacy in the form of the Magnum Agency. This huge photo bank was created by Capa, in conjunction with the famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and today still represents the more excellent photographers around. Capa, or should we say Friedmann, will not be forgotten like old negatives in photographic archives (or worse still, in a drawer in the bedroom).
Of course, getting close to the subject is still one of the primary rules of picture taking. “Walk several meters closer” is one of my ways of saying the same thing, and in fact I call it the first rule of photography. When you look through the viewfinder at the subject, do just that – with the camera to your eye walk towards the subject and see just how the emphasis changes in the picture. The closer you get, the more the subject will fill the frame and dominate the entire photograph. In fact, this weekend take one shot from where you would normally do it, then take another couple as you walk closer. Compare the end results and see if Robert Capa (and Harry Flashman) are not correct.
There is a large hotel behind the office and every day I see holidaymakers taking shots of their friends outside it. They stand so far away, that the people will be small dots at the base of the building, and unrecognizable. If they would only walk several meters closer it would be so different. Some days I think I should paint an X on the spots for the photographers to stand and another one for where the subjects should be placed. Perhaps that could be Harry Flashman’s contribution to world photographic excellence?
