Cornell Capa - Works

Works

Capa's work is oftentimes considered quite eclectic, capturing moments as large of scale as wars to everyday subtle gestures of life, from the Six-Day War to children playing stick ball in the street. Capa wrote, "It took me some time to realize that the camera is a mere tool, capable of many uses, and at last I understood that, for me, its role, its power, and its duty are to comment, describe, provoke discussion, awaken conscience, evoke sympathy, spotlight human misery and joy which otherwise would pass unseen, un-understood and unnoticed. I have been interested in photographing the everyday life of my fellow humans and the commonplace spectacle of the world around me, and in trying to distill out of these their beauty and whatever is of permanent interest."

In 1968 Capa published a book called The Concerned Photographer. As evidenced in his work, this title sums up his approach to photojournalism. Among the many events and causes Capa documented were the oppression of the Perón regime in Argentina and the subsequent revolution, Israel's Six-Day War, the plight of the Russian Orthodox Church under Soviet rule, and the education of mentally retarded children. He also took great interest in politics and documented the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, along with Kennedy's first one hundred days in office.

Capa wrote forewords to several collections of his brother's photographs and was known to be protective of Robert Capa's memory and reputation. For example, when Robert Capa's famous image of a falling Spanish soldier during the Spanish Civil War was claimed to be a fake and not taken at the moment of death, Cornell Capa entered into a long battle to establish the legitimacy of the photograph, including tracking down the name of the soldier and his date of death.