Winter Kept Us Warm

The name Robert Capa might be unfamiliar to many, but show them a photograph of his and there's a good chance they'll recognise it. Covering no less than five separate conflicts over the course of his lifetime, the man personified the archetype of the globe-trotting photojournalist. And while he was heavily scrutinised for staging maneuvers, it's hard to overlook the fact that he stormed the beaches of Normandy wielding nothing but a camera (only 11/106 frames were salvaged, courtesy of the overeager 15 year-old lab assistant).


Ironically, the name Robert Capa was a contrivance of the artist and his photographic partner (and then fiancee), Gerda Pohorylle, in an effort to bolster his recognisability as a freelance journalist. Born Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest, the man who would be Capa chose his namesake as both a nod to the director Frank Capa and a play on the Hungarian word for shark ("cápa").


However, as astute as his nose was for smelling blood in the water, it seems that Capa himself was unable to duck his own personal tragedies. His fiancee, Gerda Pohorylle (or 'Taro', as she later changed her surname to), was killed on assignment in Brunete in 1937 whilst documenting the Spanish Civil War. Over the course of WWII and shortly thereafter, Capa was romantically linked to Elaine Justin and Ingrid Bergman, but both were short-lived affairs and he never married either.

In 1954, despite swearing never to photograph another war, he found himself in the middle of the First Indochina War. Whilst accompanying a French regiment and shooting their advance, Capa stepped on a landmine. He died with his camera in his hand.