The careers of visual artists boil down to almost nothing – a handful of images imperfectly remembered, and nothing left at all of the moment of their creation.
It’s true even of a comparative modern like Robert Capa. Capa’s intense working career was twenty one years long, stretching from his encounter with Trotsky at the Copenhagan Sportspalast in late 1932 to his death in action three miles from Thanh Ne in Vietnam in May 1954. But it can feel like a weekend in which he spent a dusty Friday early evening capturing the Falling Soldier and a terrible Sunday buying his Magnificent Eleven D-Day images of Omaha Beach with fear and blood and saltwater. Long after the memories of his contemparies grassed over there was still shouting over the precise circumstances of these two extraordinary moments shared with his Contax and Rolleiflex, and in the case of the Magnificent Eleven it is all still going on. Photography is finally getting the connoisseurship and attention that has always attended the attribution of a painting. But painting attributions rarely come so close to the meaning of the memory of the artist as the argument over the Falling Soldier and the Magnificent Eleven has come to Capa, and I think sometimes that it has to be remembered also that before the photographs were taken, Capa was in the trenches forward of Cerro Muriano, and Capa was at Omaha Beach, and as a volunteer and a passionate witness on both occasions.
It’s striking how little writers on photographic history make of the physical experience of composing, taking and developing a photograph. Every time the early photographers went to work they were confronted with a difficult, delicate and expensive exercise that involved the use of dangerous chemicals where success depended upon a host of variables many of which were beyond their immediate control. The path to an image lay through weighty, tangible, inescapable steps. Although these would become practiced they would never give way to short cuts. Robert Adamson created perhaps 1500 calotypes in the four years 1843-1847: at the Battle of the Segre in 1938 Robert Capa would get through about 350 exposures in a day on nine 35mm films. A modern wedding photographer might clear that number in an hour and exceed Adamson’s career total by the end of a working weekend. For Adamson, for Capa, there was a constant and physical exercise that their career and modern fame depended upon their executing in full, and each and every one of their images involved it and demanded it.