‘He invented a style’: war chronicler Robert Capa refashioned himself and revolutionised photography

A Paris exhibition showcases how the Magnum agency founder documented not just battle but also victims of war

It is not often that you get to see a war photographer at work. Certainly not one who more or less defines our idea of the profession as it exists today, is widely considered to be its greatest practitioner and has been dead for more than 70 years.

But as part of its new retrospective, the Museum of the Liberation of Paris has produced a short but remarkable candid film of Robert Capa on the job. He is largely unaware he is being filmed and the cameramen mostly do not know they are filming him.

The researchers started with the 30 contact sheets – 24 rolls of film, about 500 photographs – the Hungarian-born photographer took on 25 and 26 August 1944, when the French capital was freed from four gruelling years of German occupation.

Life, the multimillion-selling US magazine, published six of them in a 15-page spread entitled Paris Is Free Again that would further cement the fame of the man Britain’s Picture Post had already dubbed “the greatest war photographer in the world”.

In a process that took several months, the museum’s team first worked out precisely where Capa was when he took each one of those photos. Then they checked them against every frame of reams of US army footage filmed in the same spots.

The result, said Sylvie Zaidman, the museum director, was startling. “He’s there,” she said. “We found him. We can see him, with the Free French in the suburbs and De Gaulle on the Champs-Élysées. Dodging bullets on the rue Saint-Dominique.”

Above all, Zaidman said, the footage shows Capa working, his three cameras – two Contaxes, a larger-format Rolleiflex – around his neck, over two chaotic days in which up to 1,000 French résistants died: sprinting, crouching, mingling, spinning to shoot.

“He invented a style, fashioned our whole perception of war photography,” Zaidman said. “Immediate, unposed, immersed in action. He said: ‘If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.’ And here we see him actually doing it.”

The liberation of Paris was personal for Capa. Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, he had arrived in the French capital in 1933 after a brief spell in Berlin. It was, he said, “a magnificent city” where he discovered “love, good wine and fine cuisine”.

It was in Paris that he gave himself his new name, realising, as a Jewish exile and a vocal anti-fascist, that finding work would not necessarily be easy. “If he invented a photographic style,” Zaidman said, “he also invented, little by little, a character.”

That character is now our image of the war photographer, she said. “American, typically. Intrepid, if not reckless – taking crazy risks for the one big shot. Hard drinking, poker playing, womanising, cynical. That was Capa. But it was fabricated.”

Besides the film, the exhibition charts – in photos, magazines, articles, cameras and other objects – the photographer’s transition from youthful, anti-authoritarian interwar Hungarian émigré to globally feted US war photographer.

It includes Capa’s first published photos, of Leon Trotsky in Copenhagen in 1932. In Paris his Montparnasse circle included fellow photographers-in-exile André Kertész, Gisèle Freund, David Szymin (Chim) and one Frenchman, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Capa published pictures of the leftwing Front Populaire in sympathetic magazines, aided by a girlfriend, Gerta Pohorylle, who worked for a photo agency and, as Gerda Taro, would accompany him to Spain – where she died, crushed by a tank, in 1937.

Taro and Capa had arrived in Barcelona days after the start of the Spanish civil war, in late July 1936, his early shots already imbued with a humanity that meant he captured soldiers under fire with as much force as tearful children caught in an air raid.

His break came that September, when Capa’s most celebrated shot was published in Vu magazine. Despite controversy over its location and the identity of its subject, The Falling Soldier remains one of the most astonishing war photographs of all time.

Life and Picture Post began taking his work. He left for New York in 1939, but by 1941 was in London, then Africa and Sicily for the Allied landings. The 11 out-of-focus shots he grabbed from the slaughter of Omaha beach on D-day are terrifying.

After the war, Capa co-founded the Magnum photo agency, had an affair with Ingrid Bergman, and mainly shot celebrities and fashion for Life, from Hollywood to the south of France. He was killed in 1954, in Vietnam, by stepping on a landmine.

Decades after Capa’s death, the exhibition’s 15-minutes film reveals his loping form, digitally highlighted, haring towards the heart of the action; taking cover as shots get too close; jumping on to a Free French scout car; mixing with the half-fearful, half-jubilant crowd.

On just one occasion he slips out of role. After a fierce exchange of fire between German troops and the Free French fighters in the rue de Bourgogne, Capa followed the victors to the Palais Bourbon, home of the French parliament.

There, US film footage clearly shows him first photographing a uniformed Nazi officer, clutching a white cloth, approaching and speaking to the German soldiers still inside – then setting his camera aside and helping talk them into surrender.

Capa, said Zaidman, “photographed not war but the actors and the victims of war. Like him, his pictures had to speak.” The exhibition, she said, seeks to place his iconic images in “their personal and historical context. A tighter focus, you might say.”

Robert Capa: War Photographer opens on 18 February at the Musée de la Libération de Paris and runs until 20 December