Biography provided by Focal press
 
Perceptive photographer who inspired humanist photojournalism later championed and known as "Concerned Photography." Photographed the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, Israeli independence, and the Indochina (Vietnam) War where he was killed by a landmine. Key co-founder with Cartier-Bresson of Magnum Photos (1947). Stated, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." A self-declared "gambler," Capa went in on the first wave of the 1944 D-Day invasion, only to have all but eight of his exposures ruined by a London darkroom assistant. Capa was so animated he often made exposures more rapidly than his camera's fastest shutter speed. These blurry and grainy images, such as the Death of the Loyalist Soldier (1936), give the sense that Capa could see events that occurred even too quickly for a camera to record.
 
(Author: RH)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Wikipedia
 
Robert Capa (; born Endre Ernő Friedmann; October 22, 1913 - May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history. Friedman had fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with his professional partner Gerda Taro, and they began to publish their work separately. Capa's deep friendship with David Seymour-Chim was captured in Martha Gellhorn's novella Two by Two. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers. During his career he risked his life numerous times, most dramatically as the only civilian photographer landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of Paris. His friends and colleagues included Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and director John Huston. In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Hungary has issued a stamp and a gold coin in his honor. He was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.