Robert Capa: In the Making

Capa’s groundbreaking photographs contextualized through original articles and his own rarely seen notes on the margins of prints

Photographer, filmmaker and war correspondent Robert Capa (1913-54) is a legend of photojournalism. His work—widely recognized and disseminated, although sometimes criticized for its truthfulness—is integral to the history of the photograph. Capa covered all the major midcentury events: from the Front Populaire in France to the Spanish Civil War, World War II and finally the First Indochina War, where he lost his life. Robert Capa in the Making retraces Capa’s work through images from private collections published for the first time. Together with his most iconic works, these rarely seen images construct a complete story, particularly how they were used and published. Reproductions of original newspaper articles illustrated by Capa’s images create new narratives through which to judge his documentation. Le Monde journalist Michel Lefebvre interprets the hidden details omitted through the years; the writing on the backs of the prints, a detail on a note, a place left out or a date that changes are all clues that reconstruct this immense corpus.