Robert Capa

Robert Capa was one of the most famous war photographers who ever lived, known for getting dangerously close to the action. Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, he invented the glamorous name Robert Capa partly to sell his pictures. He covered five wars, and his blurred, urgent image of a falling soldier in the Spanish Civil War became one of the defining photographs of the twentieth century, even as debate still swirls around how it was made.

He landed with American troops on D-Day and shot a series of shaky, grainy frames that captured the chaos of the beach like nothing else. Capa helped found Magnum Photos, the famous cooperative of independent photographers, and he lived by the idea that if your pictures were not good enough, you were not close enough. That closeness cost him his life in 1954, when he stepped on a landmine while covering the war in Indochina.