WAR AND PEACE

Some of these photographers became legendary, and their chronicles have inspired subsequent generations. Among them are the members of the image bureau Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David “Chim” Seymour and William Vandivert. Initially, they had headquarters in Paris and New York, with staff and assistants who handled administration, copying and cataloguing. The photographers chose their own assignments, and an important key principle was that they kept the copyright for their images. The screen shows a selection of photographs by Robert Capa and by Julia Pirotte, the latter one of the few female photographers who made her way within the male-dominated and hard-boiled field of war photography.

The charismatic Robert Capa (1913–1954), who directed Magnum during its first years, was crucial to the image bureau’s success. The photo of a falling Republican soldier from the Spanish Civil War is his most famous image. It became emblematic of the power of the photographic medium and its capacity to portray sudden death – but it also triggered discussions of whether it was staged. Capa became a war correspondent for Life throughout the rest of the Second World War. A few years later, in 1954, when he was in Hanoi to report on the war in French Indochina, he stepped on a landmine and died.

Julia Pirotte (1908–2000), was born in Konskowola, a small Jewish town in Poland. She was imprisoned for four years before she fled in 1934. She ended up in Brussels, where she obtained a camera and started studying photography and journalism. When Germany attacked Belgium, she fled once more, to Marseille, where she established herself as a photographer. Julia Pirotte’s pictures have been used widely by news agencies and provide a crucial documentation of the liberation of France in the Second World War.