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August 16, 2015

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Exhibition unveils bright side of war photographer

By Peter Murphy | August 16, 2015, Sunday | Print Edition

LEGENDARY photojournalist Robert Capa may be primarily known for his dramatic black-and-white war images, but an exhibition in Budapest is casting light on his lesser-known color peacetime pictures.

For six decades after his death in 1954, Capa’s color images remained largely overlooked — until the “Capa in Color” exhibition was launched 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.

From the French beaches of Biarritz to movie stars like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, the vibrant photos stand in stark contrast to Capa’s world-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,” said Istvan Viragvolgyi of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photo Center in Budapest.

When US company Kodak released its Kodachrome color 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 — recognized color’s potential and became an early adopter. From 1947 onwards, Capa almost always worked with two cameras, one loaded with black-and-white film, one with color.

Pitching ideas to post-war leisure and travel magazines, he persuaded editors to let him photograph celebrities.

The Budapest exhibition reveals color prints of Pablo Picasso at the seaside and of the US writer 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 color photography entered mainstream news. The delay in showing Capa’s own color collection can be partly explained through the fact that many of the images needed to be digitally restored, a painstaking process.

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