Cornell Capa, 90, Dies In New York
NEW YORK, NY (May 23, 2008) – Cornell Capa, the founder of the International Center of Photography in New York after a long career as a Life magazine photographer and Magnum Photos photographer, died at his home in Manhattan today.
The younger brother of infamous war photographer Robert Capa, who after his brother's death in 1954 in Vietnam when he stepped on a land mine championed his work for much of the remainder of his life, was 90.
Phyllis Levine, ICP's communications director, said Capa died of natural causes. For several years the photographer had battled Parkinson's.
While Cornell Capa spent much of his career interested in politics and social justice, his book "The Concerned Photographer" in 1968 summarized his professional beliefs that photojournalism should be focused on contributing to the "understanding and well-being of humanity," and photographers should strive to produce work in which "genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism."
Photojournalism has benefited from Capa's career not only through his own pictures, but also through his tireless representation of Robert Capa's work, and through the programs and presentations that have come to life through ICP. Opened in 1974, ICP has become synonymous with photojournalism's best in exhibits, collections, and education through classes at the ICP school.
Capa joined Magnum Photos in 1954 after the death of his brother, an agency founded nine years earlier in 1947 by Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Capa said he was motivated 20 years later to found ICP at a time when photojournalism seemed to be taking a back seat to television and film, and over his concern about how to "keep alive" the work of photojournalists after their death (a personal experience for the photographer in light of his famous brother's work).
He continued to work as a photographer until the mid-1970s when the duties of administering ICP became great enough that he felt he didn't have enough time for his own work.
In May of this year, a missing suitcase of thousands of Robert Capa's war photographs from the Spanish Civil War were found after being lost for 70 years. ICP acquired the find, which somehow made its way from Paris to Mexico in 1940, and three flimsy cardboard boxes of Capa's film returned to ICP in time for Cornell Capa to appreciate the discovery.
Cornell Capa was born Cornel Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary, in 1918, five years after Robert, and he was the youngest of three Friedmann boys. Their older brother, Laszlo, died in 1935. The Capa brothers ended up in Paris together, when he was 19, and it was there where his plans to become a doctor were sidetracked by Robert's blooming career as a photojournalist. They both changed their last name from Friedmann to Capa, and in 1937 Cornell Capa followed his mother to New York. After a darkroom job with a photo agency, he began working in the Life magazine darkrooms.
During World War II he served an a photography intelligence unit for the U.S. Air Force, and in 1946 he started as a "junior photographer" at Life.
Among a lifetime of awards, Capa was presented with the Leica Medal of Excellence in 1986 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Aperture Foundation in 1999.
ICP says that Capa will be buried in a private ceremony, alongside his brother Robert, in Amawalk, NY, on May 28. Then on September 10 a public memorial service is planned for 10 a.m. at The Times Center, 242 West 41st Street, New York, NY.
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