The story of the most famous Hungarian photojournalist – Photo Gallery

He never avoided challenges – he brought his restless, adventurous spirit and toughness from Hungary. He made photo-history with his war reportage on the Spanish Civil War, World War II, China, and Vietnam. His stories and his slogan – “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” – made him a legendary person. But he made a mistake in Thái Bình. He went too close. This is the story of the most famous Hungarian photographer, Robert Capa.

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Endre Friedmann was born in Budapest on October 22, 1913, in a Hungarian-Jewish family. He had an older and younger brother who also became photographers, one of them – Kornél – actually achieved a great carrier under the name of Cornell Capa. Friedmann finished his grammar school studies at Imre Madách Grammar School in Budapest. In 1931, he moved to Vienna, then Praha, and Berlin where he studied journalism for a short time. In 1933, he returned to the Hungarian capital, but he shortly needed to emigrate because he was charged with treason with the Communist Party. He moved on and settled down in Paris.

Besides learning journalism in Berlin, he started to lay down his connections and to gain experience from professional photographers and this way he made a lot of new friends. After arriving in Paris, he used these friendly-connections to convince French photographers to educate him. In the French capital, he made a life-long friendship with photographer Gerda Taro, who was also his love interest, and allegedly they made up the name Robert Capa together.

He went to record the Spanish Civil War in 1936–1937 together with Gerda Taro (whom he taught photography), assigned by Regards, a leftist French weekly magazine and together with Taro they made their first mainstream success. His photography The Falling Soldier (original title: Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936) became his first well-known and later most successful and iconic photography in the history of photos.

The photo appears to capture a Republican soldier at the very moment of death. The soldier is shown collapsing backwards after being fatally shot in the head, with his rifle slipping out of his right hand. The pictured soldier is dressed in civilian clothing but is wearing a leather cartridge belt.

On September 23, 1936, the picture got published for the first time by the French VU Magazine and later by LIFE and several other magazines and newspapers under the influence and control of the World War propaganda institute. After publishing the photography several prominent photographers claimed it a masterpiece but in the 1970s the photo received several attacks and negative criticism, claiming it simple staged photography. The debate around the Fallen Soldier has not come to an end yet.