Robert Capa: A Graphic Biography

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Firefly Books

Annotation: Robert Capa dedicated his life to capturing all the wars of the world in photographs. This biography tells the legendary story of the prolific photojournalist and immerses us in a unique period of contemporary history.

Genre: [Graphic novels] [Biographies]

Reviews: 2

Catalog Number: #192329

Format: Publisher's Hardcover

Special Formats: Graphic Novel

Publisher: Firefly Books

Edition Date: 2017 Release Date: 09/01/17

ISBN: 1-7708-5928-4

ISBN 13: 978-1-7708-5928-9

Dewey: 921

Language: English

Reviews:

Kirkus Reviews

The great war photographer revisits public triumphs and private tragedies over the course of a tumultuous career.Speaking in the first person, Capa shows how he earned his reputation on front lines from the Spanish Civil War to the French defeat in Southeast Asia and on other major assignments along the way. In between he recalls personal and professional struggles, hobnobbing with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, and multiple affairs, most notably with fellow photographer Gerda Taro and Ingrid Bergman. His monologue is delivered in a small, faux hand-lettered typeface that captions neatly squared-off sepia panels of boudoirs and battlefronts drawn in ink with white highlights. Celebrities and associates are recognizable, but most figures are too loosely rendered to judge ethnic origins except from context. The art and spare narrative voice combine to give the memoir a somber, distant feel, but some sequences, such as the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach in which the photographer, cursing in English and his native Hungarian, struggles to get his shots as troops are dying on every side, are nightmarishly vivid. Though none of Capa's photos are reproduced here, Silloray adds visual references to many of the more iconic ones; readers who go on to seek out the originals may be surprised at how many are part of our enduring cultural legacy. Frank and sharply focused, if lacking the depth of field displayed in Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos' Eyes of the World (2017). (Graphic biography. 12-14)

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Reading Level: 9.0

Interest Level: 9+

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.<br > --Robert Capa

Robert Capa: A Graphic Biography is a brilliant portrayal of the career of the great war photographer who, at the time of his death in 1954, had only one wish: to be an unemployed war photographer. "It is not always easy" he said, "to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the suffering."

Born in 1913 to a Jewish family in Budapest, Endre Friedmann left home at 18 for Germany where he studied journalism and political science and worked in a photo agency darkroom. In 1933, Friedmann went to Paris where he shared a darkroom with Henri Cartier-Bresson and lived with Gerda Taro, also a photographer. Together they contrived the name and image "Robert Capa, famous American photographer".

Capa made several trips to document the Spanish Civil War, where he took the seminal image, "Death of a Loyalist Soldier" for which he was heralded as "the greatest war photographer in the world".

By the start of World War II, Capa was in New York freelancing for LIFE, Time, and other publications. He went abroad with the US army to record Allied involvement in WWII, including D-Day on Omaha beach. Disembarking from a landing boat, he took the only images of the invasion. He went on to cover the war in Leipzig, Nuremberg, Berlin, London and Paris. Even now, it is the D-Day images that marked him as the world's greatest war photographer.

Robert Capa: A Graphic Biography, written in the first person, follows his personal and professional life and through his eyes, the social upheaval and earth-shattering wars of the 20th century. It shows his intimate life and his relationships with the day's larger-than-life personalities: Ingrid Bergman, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

Sepia watercolors wash the book in the fog of war and recall Capa's generation on the cusp of color film. They show his professional work, his personal battles, his victories and struggles, and his legacy: the founding of the Magnum, a cooperative photo agency which gives photographers control of their work.

In 1954, having sworn off war photography but in need of money, he left to cover his fifth war, in Indochina. Driven by his conviction that "if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough," he was with a French patrol when he stepped on a landmine and was killed, camera in hand.

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