In Abano Terme a major exhibition on Robert Capa's photography beyond the war

From January 15 to June 5, 2022, Villa Bassi Rathgeb in Abano Terme (Padua) hosts the exhibition Robert Capa. Photographs Beyond War curated by Marco Minuz and promoted by the Municipality of Abano Terme.

The photographs on display aim to present an “other” Capa, focusing on little-known reportage and his photography away from war. “There is no doubt that the war experience was at the center of his activity as a photographer: the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese resistance in the face of the invasion of Japan, World War II, and the French war in Indochina (1954), during which he died, killed by a landmine, at the age of only forty,” the curator explains. "Acquiring, in these actions, a fame that allowed him to publish in the most important international magazines, including Life and Picture Post, with that style of photographing powerful and touching at the same time, without any rhetoric and with such an urgency that he pushed himself to shoot a few meters from the battlefields, right into the heart of conflicts; famous, in this sense, is his statement: If you haven’t taken a good photograph, it means that you haven’t approached reality sufficiently. These photographs of his are now heritage of the iconographic culture of the last century."

This major exhibition stems from the desire to bear witness to aspects that cannot be traced back to the suffering of war: it aims to explore through about a hundred shots, the photographer’s relationship with the world of culture of the time with portraits of famous people, such as Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway. The section devoted to period films is particularly interesting. After the end of World War II Capa was on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorius, where he tried his hand for the first time as a set photographer. Within a very few years Capa is confronted with the likes of Humphrey Bogart and John Houston; he immortalizes the beauty of Gina Lollobrigida and the intensity of Anna Magnani. He then matured in his choice to confront the great masters of Neorealism. Extraordinary then are the images captured on the set of Riso Amaro, with portraits of Silvana Mangano and Doris Dowling.

The exhibition itinerary is enriched by a section devoted to the collaboration between American writer John Steinbeck and Robert Capa that would initiate the Russian Diary project. In 1947 Steinbeck and Capa decided to set out together on a journey of discovery to theSoviet Union. What emerged was an ideology-free account of the daily life of that people. The diary pages and photographs chronicling life in Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad, and Georgia are the fruits of an extraordinary journey and a unique historical document of an era. A cultural report on the ordinary people of one of the countries least explored by the world’s journalists and reporters. The exhibition continues with a series of photographs taken in France in 1938 and dedicated to that year’s edition of the Tour de France, where the photographer’s focus will always be predominantly on the public as opposed to the athletes’ sporting exploits.

A section is then devoted to the birth of the State of Israel. Robert Capa, a Hungarian of Jewish origin who emigrated to Germany and then to France and the United States and founded the Magnum Photos agency, had arrived there to document the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. A few years after the Holocaust, Capa’s lens documents the initial stages of the establishment of the new state.

For more info: www.museovillabassiabano.it

Image: Henri Matisse in his studio, Nice, August 1949 ©Robert Capa ©International Center of Photography / Magnum Photos

In Abano Terme a major exhibition on Robert Capa's photography beyond the war

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