Rovigo, at Palazzo Roverella a major exhibition on Robert Capa with 366 photographs

From October 8, 2022 to January 29, 2023, Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo hosts the exhibition Robert Capa. The Work 1932-1954, curated by Gabriel Bauret: this is the new appointment with international photography proposed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo, once again joined by the Municipality of Rovigo and the Accademia dei Concordi.

The exhibition showcases 366 photographs selected from the archives of theMagnum Photos agency and traces the main stages of Robert Capa ’s (Endre ErnÅ‘ Friedmann; Budapest, 1913 - Thai Binh Province, 1954) career, giving space to some of the most iconic works that embodied the history of 20th-century photography. However, the exhibition is not only conceived as a retrospective of Robert Capa’s work, but rather aims to reveal through the proposed images the facets, the slightest folds of a passionate and ultimately elusive, insatiable and perhaps never fully satisfied character, who did not hesitate to risk his life for his reportages. Capa in fact always manifested a gamer’s temperament, but a free player.

In showing, he also seeks to understand, revolves around his subject, both literally and figuratively. The exhibition brings together on different occasions several points of view of the same event, as if to reproduce a field-counterpoint movement, and returns a cinematic breath often perceptible in many sequences. “For me, Capa wore the light suit of a great bullfighter, but he did not kill; as a good player, he fought generously for himself and others in a whirlwind. Fate had it that he was struck down at the height of his glory,” Henri Cartier-Bresson had written of him.

The exhibition will display the depictions of war that forged Capa’s legend, but not only that. In the photographer’s reportages, as in his entire oeuvre, there are what Raymond Depardon calls “weak times,” as opposed to the strong times that characterize the actions; the weak times bring us back to the man, to his sensitivity to the victims and the dispossessed, to what was ultimately his personal journey from Hungary onward. Images that hint at the artist’s complicity and empathy with respect to the subjects portrayed, soldiers as well as civilians, in the terrains of confrontation, where he has been most active and distinguished. Thus, in the wake of his human affairs, the theme of population migrations (in Spain and China, in particular) recurs repeatedly. And between one image and another, Capa’s identity also looms large.

The exhibition will be divided into 9 thematic sections: Early Photographs, 1932 - 1935; The Hope for a More Just Society, 1936; Spain: Civic Engagement, 1936 - 1939; China Under Fire from Japan, 1938; Alongside American Soldiers, 1943 - 1945; Toward a Newfound Peace, 1944 - 1954; Travels East, 1947 - 1948; Israel Promised Land, 1948 - 1950; Return to Asia: a War That Is Not His, 1954. The public will also be able to view publications of Robert Capa’s reportages in the French and American press of the time and excerpts from his texts on photography, which among others touch on topics such as blur, distance, craft, political engagement, and war.

Also available will be excerpts from a film by Patrick Jeudy on Robert Capa in which John G. Morris emotionally comments on documents showing Capa in action in the field, and finally the sound recording of an interview of Capa with Radio Canada.

Robert Capa was born in 1913 in Budapest; in his youth he moved to Berlin, where he began his great career as a photojournalist that would lead him to travel all over the world. In 1947 he founded with Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour the famous Magnum Photos agency. He died in Indochina in 1954, injured by a landmine while documenting the war at the front.

For all info you can visit the Palazzo Roverella website.

Image: Robert Capa, Near Troina. August, 1943. Sicilian peasant telling an American officer which way the Germans had gone. ©Robert Capa © International Center of Photography / Magnum Photos.

Rovigo, at Palazzo Roverella a major exhibition on Robert Capa with 366 photographs

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