[1913 – 1954] Born in Hungary - possibly the most famous war photographer of the 20th century
Scroll down
If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.
before he got too close to mine that killed him, while covering Indochina.
I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.
at the end of World War II
Great Themes : LIFE Library of Photography by Time-Life (Editor)
Page: 212 This book is available from Amazon
War is like an aging actress: more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic.
Page: 213 This book is available from Amazon
Like the people you shoot and let them know it.
The war correspondent has his stake, his life, in his own hands and he can put it on this horse or that horse , or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.
Robert Capa talking about the D Day landings.
What’s the point of getting killed if you’ve got the wrong exposure?
For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.
Watch out for labels. They are reassuring but somebody’s going to stick one on you that you’ll never get rid of—“the little surrealist photographer.” You'll be lost—you’ll get precious and mannered. Take instead the label of “photojournalist” and keep the other thing for yourself, in your heart of hearts.
Warning to Henri Cartier-Bresson
The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.
It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.
It’s not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.
Capa often joked.
If you call yourself an artist, you won't get anything published. Call yourself a photojournalist, and then you can do whatever you want.
Robert Capa advised his friend Henri Cartier-Bresson who wanted to pursue his interests in Surrealism, yet wanted to have his photographs published in the 1930s.
The refugees on the road are in the hands of fate, with their lives at stake.
The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.
You don’t have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.
On the Spanish Civil War, 1937
I had it bad. The empty camera trembled in my hands. It was a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.
Remembrance of landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day.
Writing the truth being so obviously difficult, I have in the interests of it allowed myself to go sometimes beyond and slightly this side of it. All events and persons in this book are accidental and have something to do with the truth.
On first edition dust jacket of Slightly Out of Focus
Great picture [could be] cut out of the whole event [so that it] will show more of the real truth of the affair to someone who was not there than the whole scene.
