Robert Capa out of the shadows

The celebrated photojournalist Robert Capa is primarily remembered for his dramatic black-and-white war images, but an exhibition in Hungary is casting light on his lesser-known colour peacetime pictures.

For six decades after his death in 1954, Capa’s colour images remained largely overlooked. Then the exhibition “Capa in Colour” opened in New York last year. Now in Europe for the first time, the collection reveals an unexpected bright side to the Hungarian-born frontline correspondent.

With images of the French beaches of Biarritz to movie stars like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, the vibrant photos stand in stark contrast to Capa’s famous shots of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s or the D-Day landings in Normandy a decade later.

They demonstrate that he was ahead of his time and “always tried to find a new way to express himself”, says Istvan Viragvolgyi of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photo Centre in Budapest.

When Kodak released its Kodachrome colour film in 1936, editors dismissed the new technology as of inferior aesthetic value, only good for advertising. But Capa – who co-founded Magnum, the world’s first cooperative agency for freelance photographers – recognised colour’s potential and became an “early adopter”, says Viragvolgyi.

Having made his name as a daring war correspondent, Capa – born Endre Erno Friedmann – packed rolls of colour film in his luggage for a 1938 assignment in China covering the Second Sino-Japanese war. “He wanted to experiment on location, not in his backyard at home,” Viragvolgyi explains.

But Capa’s efforts failed to convince editors, who continued to pick his black-and-white images. “They said, ‘We don’t want the colour pictures because they’re not high-value enough for our topics,” Viragvolgyi says.

The new film was also expensive and had to be sent back to Kodak in the US for developing, a process too time-consuming for most newsrooms. This resistance to colour persisted even in Capa’s closest circles. “Photography in colour?” his fellow Magnum star Henri Cartier-Bresson once scoffed. “It’s something indigestible, the negation of all photography’s three-dimensional values.”

Undaunted, Capa developed his skills by deliberately using colour effects, often adding rich blues as backgrounds. “He could sense where colour might add to a picture,” says Viragvolgyi.

A 1943 image on display in Budapest shows the French Camel Corps riding to battle in the Tunisian desert against a vivid blue sky backdrop. “If this was in black-and-white it would be quite dull,” Viragvolgyi remarks. “The colour enhances rather than distracts as colour can do sometimes – one reason why it was often seen as inferior to black-and-white.”

Another picture shows men on a tree in Fez, Morocco, waiting for the Sultan to appear at a ceremony. “It’s a simple picture, like a black-and-white, but without the green of the foliage it would lose its spirit,” Viragvolgyi says.

From 1947 onward, Capa almost always worked with two cameras, one loaded with black-and-white film, one with colour. Pitching ideas to post-war leisure and travel magazines, he persuaded editors to let him photograph celebrities like Bogart, Bergman and Orson Welles at ski resorts and on movie shoots. To his great frustration, the magazines often still only used the black-and-white versions, however.

The Budapest exhibition reveals colour prints of Pablo Picasso at the seaside and of Ernest Hemingway on a family hunting trip – neither of which were ever published. A letter on display also shows Capa’s annoyance with magazines, which he urged to move with the times and use more colour. But his pleas fell on deaf ears.

Capa died in 1954 at the age of 40 after stepping on a landmine while he was covering the war in Vietnam, then called Indochina, for Life magazine. It would take at least two more decades before colour photography entered mainstream news.

The delay in showing Capa’s colour collection can be partly explained through the fact that many of the images needed to be digitally restored, a painstaking process. 

“The miracle of Capa is how he kept on reinventing himself,” says Viragvolgyi. “You have to go out and try new ways to engage, see the opportunities and take your chances, just as he did.”

On display in Budapest until September 20, the show will then head to France.