Magnum Photos Blog

Robert Capa Retrospective 

August 7, 2012 
by Robert Capa R
This exhibition shows a selection of Robert Capa's photographs about World War II as well as many portraits including those of his friends and fellow artists such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

John Steinbeck once wrote that his friend Robert Capa knew that “you cannot photograph war, because it is largely an emotion.” However, continued Steinbeck, “he did photograph that emotion by shooting beside it. He could show the horror of a whole people in the face of a child.”
In this exhibition, we see the profound human truth of the events that Capa documented. Here we have the very quintessence of Capa’s lifework. Even in the midst of war, his camera recorded few corpses or atrocities. Capa was primarily concerned with the living, not with the dead. His true subject as a war photographer was the triumph of the human spirit over even the most terrible adversity, though he also made heart-rendingly compassionate images of some whose spirits were tragically broken by their ordeals.


Kunsthal Sint-Pietersabdij
Bijlokekaai 7B
Gent 9000
Belgium

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