Capa's Credo -- 1918-2008

The photographer Cornell Capa (left), who died Friday at 90 at his home in Manhattan, was both one of the most humble and one of the most important figures in photojournalism and the history and appreciation of photography as an art form and a subject of study.

He lived, willingly and purposefully, in the shadow of his elder brother, the great war photographer Robert Capa, even, and perhaps especially, in the more than half a century since Robert Capa's death from a land mine while on a Life magazine assignment during the French War in Indochina in 1954.  But, through his care and advocacy of his brother's legacy; his own work as a photojournalist, chiefly also for Life and for Magnum Photos, the agency founded by his brother, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and David Seymour; and in his founding, in 1974, and direction of the International Center for Photography in Manhattan, Cornell Capa brought the field to wider attention, enabled it to be taken seriously, and trained and inspired several generations of photographers around the world.  

^{_{Born Kornel Friedmann, in Budapest in 1918 -- his brother, born there as well in 1913, was originally}} Endre Ernő Friedmann -- Cornell anglicized his first name and followed his brother in changing his family name to Capa in Paris in the 1930s.  Although from an assimilated family, and able to leave Hungary before the World War II, the Nazi Occupation, and the Holocaust, neither Capa brother forgot his Jewish heritage nor his connection to the Jewish people.  Robert Capa covered the 1948 War of Independence in Israel and Cornell photographed the Six Day War in 1967.

In his writings and his talks, Cornell Capa frequently quoted the pioneering socially conscious photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) in expressing a credo:

"There are two things I wanted to do.  I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected.  And I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated."  

Is there a finer goal?  A greater purpose, in living one's life?