The Capa Files Reopened

Robert Capa is widely credited for establishing the tone of modern war photography, simply by getting close to the action. A newly discovered treasure trove of his negatives brings that point home. As reported in an excellent piece in yesterday's New York Times, a found cache has been confirmed to be negatives made by Capa, as well as some by his collaborator Gerda Taro and fellow Magnum founder David Seymour. "This really is the holy grail of Capa work," says Brian Wallis, chief curator at the International Center of Photography, which has fittingly become the new home for the negatives.

The Times piece not only chronicles the tangled international journey that this batch of negatives took during the decades it was missing, but also emphasizes Capa's philosophy of getting in the thick of the battle — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough," he famously said — which ultimately helped cause Capa's death at age 40 (he stepped on a land mine while covering in the Indochina war in 1954).

According to the story, the thousands of discovered negatives at ICP contain "the raw material from the birth of modern war photography itself," in Wallis's view. "Capa established a mode and the method of depicting war in these photographs, of the photographer not being an observer but being in the battle, and that became the standard that audiences and editors from then on demanded,” Wallis says. “Anything else, and it looked like you were just sitting on the sidelines."

Indeed, that "you are there" quality informed all of Capa's war photography, most remarkably his pictures of the 1944 D-Day landings, which were salvaged from a group of negatives that had been largely destroyed by mistakes in a darkroom. The D-Day pictures, termed "slightly out of focus" when Life magazine first published them, actually show the pell-mell energy of the American soldiers' assault on Omaha Beach. Many of Capa's earlier negatives, now at ICP, have the same up-close intensity.

One mystery remains, however: the genesis of Capa's famed picture "The Falling Soldier," particularly whether this photo was staged. Although Capa biographer Richard Whelan convincingly pieced together research proving the picture's authenticity — as reported in American Photo, several other publications, and this article by Whelan — rumors have persisted that Capa and Taro set up the picture. The discovery of the lost negatives has revived hope that they would shed light on this controversy — indeed, several online reports are seizing on that possibility. But as of yet the negatives have not proven anything new about Capa's most famous image. What they have proven is the enduring significance of his legacy. — Jack Crager