CAPA, ROBERT

born 1913, Budapest died May 25, 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam original name Andrei Friedmann photographer, whose pictures of war made him one of the great photojournalists of the 20th century. He first established himself in Paris by representing his photographs as the work of Robert Capa, a fictitious American photographer who was so rich he refused to sell his work at normal prices. The deception was soon discovered, but he retained the pseudonym. Capa first achieved fame as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. His mature style fully emerged in 1936 in such grim, close-up views of death as Loyalist Soldier, Spain. In World War II he covered much of the heaviest fighting in Africa, Sicily, and Italy for Life magazine, and his photographs of the Normandy invasion are some of the most memorable of the war. In 1947 Capa joined with the photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and David (Chim) Seymour to found Magnum Photos, the first cooperative agency of international free-lance photographers. Although he covered the fighting in Palestine in 1948, most of his time was spent selling and guiding the work of newer members of Magnum. In 1954, however, he volunteered to photograph the French Indochina war for Life and was killed by a land mine.