Has War Changed, or Only
War Photography?
by Senjuti SenGupta
In the decades between Robert Capa and Lynsey Addario, our image of battle lost its aura of nobility.
Lynsey Addario began taking war pictures when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Only two-thirds of a century had elapsed since Robert Capa documented the Spanish Civil War. But to go from the exhibition of Capa’s Spain photos at the International Center of Photography to the Addario show at the SVA Chelsea Gallery is to traverse not just time and geography but a profound shift in sensibility. Capa’s pictures express his belief in war as a conflict between good and evil. In our time, which is to say in Addario’s, unwavering faith in the justice of one side has perished, a casualty of too many brutal, pointless, reciprocally corrupt wars.
Addario over the last two decades has taken her camera to some of the most dangerous places on earth. A MacArthur fellow, she is a freelance photographer who shared a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting awarded to The New York Times in 2009 for its coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like Capa, she calls herself a photojournalist, not an artist. She has said that she is dedicated to “using images to undo preconceptions and to show a reality often misunderstood or misrepresented.” She has also named Capa as one of her main influences, even though many of the preconceptions she seeks to undermine are those he enshrined.
Yet compared to the war photography that came afterward, these images are archaically dignified. “The first image of fallen soldier was a very clean, somehow very beautiful death and I think that’s what I remember most from the war,” Capa said in a radio interview in 1947. When you look at his photograph, you see what he was seeing. With good reason, we don’t see it that way anymore.
Many Americans no longer regard war as a righteous undertaking — and war photography has played a part in changing our perspective. Pictures in Korea (notably those of David Douglas Duncan) and, even more, those in Vietnam (by Larry Burrows and Don McCullin in particular) stripped warfare of its glamour and romance, zeroing in instead on blood, mud, fatigue, injury and viciousness. Television footage amplified the horror.
With extraordinary fortitude and skill, Addario has shown us the face of war today. Many of her photographs portray its victims, especially women and children: survivors of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a wounded child soldier in South Sudan, a 7-year-old boy struck by shrapnel in Afghanistan, a cargo plane filled with American soldiers on stretchers being evacuated from Iraq. She also depicts the aftermath of natural disasters, as in an extraordinary picture of a woman giving birth by the roadside near Tacloban, the Philippines, in the wake of a devastating typhoon.
It is because Addario unsparingly depicts the suffering of war that an incongruity arises between the content and the composition.
For Capa, a classical format fit his intentions: to portray war’s self-sacrifice, comradeship and other time-honored virtues. His pictures in Spain have acquired a canonical aura. The show at I.C.P. — an organization that Robert’s younger brother, Cornell Capa, founded in 1974 and which holds his archive — explores the creation of a photo book, “Death in the Making,” first published in 1938. By then, Capa had moved on to the fight in China against the Japanese, avoiding the impending defeat of a cause he championed, as well as his personal anguish after the death at the front in July 1937 of his lover, Gerda Taro, who had also been working in Spain as a photojournalist. The great majority of the pictures in “Death in the Making” are by Capa, although some are by Taro or by their friend David Seymour, known as Chim. (The I.C.P. show and an accompanying new edition of the book sort out authorship of the individual images.)
Capa devoted most of his published images to the Republican soldiers (both men and women) off the battlefield: listening to speeches, playing chess, feeding a lamb, embracing. We never forget that we are looking at particular people, each with a life that may soon be truncated. In a poignant picture of grinning young men leaning out of a railroad car and raising clenched fists on their way to the Aragon front, the friezelike composition highlights the specific traits of each soldier.
Unlike the photographers of the fascist-supported Nationalists, who depicted their soldiers either as regimented faceless men or valiant standouts, Capa illustrated the Republican ethos that the militiamen should be informed participants in the war. They are seen listening, learning, conversing. The one anomalous photograph in “Death in the Making” was shot by Taro and appeared on the back cover: a handsome, clean-cut young soldier blowing a bugle, positioned against the sky. He seems to have migrated from the fascist ranks.
Robert Capa - the rare 1947 radio interview
