Cornell Capa, one of the last remaining of the classic generation of photojournalists who came out of Europe in the 1930s died in New York last Friday, May 23, 2008, aged 90.
Cornell was perhaps always overshadowed by his more flamboyant brother Andre, who re-invented himself in Paris in the mid 1930s as the ‘famous American photographer Robert Capa‘. When Cornell joined his brother in Paris in 1936, hoping to study medicine, he started working as a printer for Robert, and also for two of his brother’s friends, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour (Chim).
In 1937 Cornell moved to New York, and Robert helped him find a job in the darkroom of the Pix agency, and, in the following year, in the darkroom at Life magazine. He also had started taking pictures, and his first picture story was published in Picture Post in 1938. During the war he worked for the USAF in photographic intelligence and in 1946 joined Life as a junior photographer.
Cornell Capa joined Magnum in 1954, shortly after his elder brother was killed in Vietnam (another early Magnum member, Werner Bischof died on more or less the same day) remaining a member until his death and serving as president for four years.
After his brother’s died, Cornell was determined to keep the memory of his work alive and to continue to promote the kind of photography he had stood for, which valued human feelings and was dedicated to improving the human situation. He set up the International Fund for Concerned Photography, Inc.
The book and exhibition ‘The Concerned Photographer‘ which he edited in 1968 for the fund included work by Robert Capa and Werner Bischof, as well as Chim, Andre Kertesz, Leonard Freed, as well as by Dan Weiner who had been killed in a plane crash in 1959.
In 1974, Cornell foiunded the International Center of Photography in New York as a permanent home for the International Fund for Concerned Photography.
You can hear the voice of Cornell Capa in a short interview on NPR with Jacki Lyden, recorded in 1994. Much of his contribution to the interview is transcribed on the web page, but there is just a little extra about hearing it in his own voice.
You can also find an obituary in the New York Times and on the Magnum blog.
Because of the fame of his brother, it’s perhaps easy to overlook the fact that Cornell was himself a very fine photographer. While Robert Capa was certainly one of the best war photographers of his era, with iconic images such as that of the falling soldier from the Spanish Civil War and his grainy and distressed work on the beach on D-Day, a living testimony to his dictum “if you pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough“, his younger sibling had a true gift for finding a different way to view things, something that stood out from the obvious.