Now on view through September 20th at Budapest’s Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, the display is a collection of brilliant works taken by Capa between 1938 and 1954 when the art of color photography was still a novelty, and thus considered unappealing by many magazine editors of the time; because of this, many of the extraordinary images on view in this exhibit went unseen for decades as the negatives languished away in storage. Originally created a year ago and brought to Budapest by New York’s International Center of Photography (founded by Robert Capa’s brother Cornell in 1974), “Capa in Color” appears for the first time in Europe here in Hungary’s capital, complemented by the photography of John G. Morris – who handled Capa’s iconic pictures of the D-Day landing at Normandy almost immediately after they were taken.
Now 98 years old, Morris delivered a powerful anti-war speech at Monday’s opening ceremony of “Capa in Color”; other distinguished guests included United States Ambassador to Hungary Colleen Bell, International Center of Photography curator Cynthia Young, and Robert Pledge, director of the Contact Press Images photo agency. Everyone at the exhibition debut agreed that this collection is remarkable, revealing dozens of Capa’s intriguing images ranging from conflict zones in both hemispheres to postwar scenes of lighthearted recreation, alongside intimate portraits of world-famous artists and their families, and unique views of places where mid-20th-century geopolitical changes were in the gradual process of altering history’s landscape forever (including pictures from Capa’s bittersweet visit to his native Budapest in 1948, just before the Soviet takeover of Hungary’s government made it impossible for the photographer to ever return).
When the Kodak company first introduced Kodachrome color film in 1935, the innovation made the process of taking color pictures much more accessible to photographers than it had ever been. By this time, Capa was establishing himself as one of the world’s greatest photojournalists, and he was quite interested in using this new medium alongside his traditional black-and-white work, but many magazine editors believed that color photography was merely a fad that was most appropriate for commercial photos. Part of what makes “Capa in Color” so fascinating is that the exhibit includes some of the photographer’s pitch letters to editors trying to convince them of the value of his color-photography ideas, which ironically often met only lukewarm responses.
In addition to the unfamiliarity of the medium, the process of submitting color pictures to magazines was additionally prohibitive for timely news reporting because Kodachrome film could only be processed by the Kodak company during that era, which took at least two weeks, not including shipping the negatives and prints – yet Capa still brought a color-film camera with him when assigned to travel along with American soldiers on transport ships heading to England in the early 1940s, when he took many expressive color pictures of troops passing the time aboard these fateful vessels with activities like boxing and sleeping; these images are now a centerpiece of the exhibit.
Because of the editorial wariness and technical difficulties involved with color photography, Capa primarily took black-and-white pictures for his WWII war reporting that earned widespread acclaim, so after hostilities ended he could expand his color repertoire on prestigious international assignments for magazines like Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Holiday, where his vivid pictures were finally appreciated and featured prominently.
These endeavors led to Capa luminously documenting Pablo Picasso vacationing with his family on the French coast, to capturing skiers enjoying their frosty hobby in the Swiss sunshine, to traveling in Idaho with Ernest Hemingway at leisure amid the great outdoors, to visiting Rome among glamorous models, to exploring Morocco for the filming of The Black Rose with Orson Welles, and to discovering many other exotic cultures; the exhibit divides these pictures by the places and circumstances as Capa experienced them, providing a fascinating visual biography of his life’s work and journey.
Nonetheless, Capa still documented areas of conflict after WWII – the color photos on view in this exhibit include his coverage of 1948’s Arab-Israeli War, his journey to Moscow’s Red Square when it was freshly festooned with oversized images of Stalin and Lenin, and to Budapest in the last days before Hungary was completely locked away behind the Iron Curtain. The concluding photos of “Capa in Color” are from his ill-fated journey to Indochina (later Vietnam) in 1954, where he died after stepping on a landmine; his color photos from this last assignment bear extra gravitas with the viewers’ knowledge that they were taken in Capa’s final days.
Enhancing “Capa in Color”, the Capa Center’s sister exhibit, “Somewhere in France – The Summer of ’44”, is a room lined with insightful black-and-white photos by John G. Morris that he never intended to be shown in public, and were actually hidden away in a desk drawer for many decades. Looking at them now, we are struck by the evident humanity of soldiers in northern France in the weeks following D-Day; one picture shows an officer kissing a young damsel in a meadow, while another shows a dead German soldier lying in an abandoned alcove. Combined with maps, identity cards, and a picture of Morris with Capa and other war photographers, this section provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes perspective to the work of photojournalists in a bygone era.
All together, “Capa in Color” and “Somewhere in France – The Summer of ’44” provides incredible insight to the invaluable art of photojournalism and a unique slice of global history, captured with unparalleled talent and intensity.
