Embassy Information

Embassy Events

Robert Capa

  Click here to see the video of the opening ceremony (in Spanish)

Robert Capa / Photographs
The United State Embassy and the Centro Cultural Borges are co-sponsoring the Robert Capa/Photographs exhibition. The exhibition features almost 80 photographs of key historical events of the 20th Century. The exhibition will be open until April 19, Monday to Saturday from 10 am to 9 pm and Sundays from 12 pm to 9 pm in Viamonte and San Martin (2nd. Floor, room 23)

Robert Capa's story is a peculiarly American one. Like many Americans throughout the centuries, he was born in a foreign country, but went to the United States to escape political repression.  In his case, he was a Jew escaping from the Nazis. In the United States, he found a home where he was able to give full expression to his creative and artistic impulses. He became a citizen in 1946. Capa is one in a long list of talented people whose desire to live in freedom has proven an enormous benefit to the American cultural mosaic. 

He photographed every war from the Spanish Civil War, to World War II, to the Israeli war for independence.  A bullet that grazed him during that war in 1948 led him to sit out the Korean War, but he returned to war photography during the beginnings of the Vietnam War, where he was killed when he stepped on a landmine.  His camera was not damaged, however, and the film in it was developed.  Several of those pictures appear in the exhibit.

His work appeared in the most famous photography magazines of that era before television – Life, Collier’s Weekly, Weekly Illustrated, and countless others.  He knew, and was poker buddies with, some of the most famous names in the United States – John Steinbeck, John Huston, Ernest Hemingway, Ernie Pyle, the list seems to go on forever, but most memorably includes Ingrid Bergman, with whom he had an affair.  His larger than life personality was an inspiration to writers and movie makers.  Capa met Alfred Hitchcock when he visited Ingrid Bergman on the set of Notorious; Hitchcock later based his main character in Rear Window on Capa.  Irwin Shaw’s novel Evening in Byzantium, in which the protagonist remembers “a houseguest who went a long way toward wrecking” a summer, was based on a long visit Capa made to Shaw’s Mediterranean home.  It was said that he had a “marvelous capacity to get on with generals and peasants.”

Along with his friends Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert he founded the Magnum Agency (tellingly named after a champagne bottle) so that other photographers could concentrate on taking pictures without having to take the time to sell them.  Mr. Capa became the president in 1951 and the Magnum Agency is very much alive and well, organizing exhibits and awarding photography prizes.

He had an enormous impact on future generations of photographers.  He often said, “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”  He always had the time to encourage and mentor younger photographers and he has been described as “brother and father to them all.”  The Robert Capa Medal honors “superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad.”  

This exhibit demonstrates, not just the talent and ambition that Mr. Capa possessed, but a very human and very American story of an unending search for liberty and freedom of expression.