PRESS RELEASE

Capa in color

Musei Reali, Sale Chiablese

26 September 2020 – 31 January 2021

The exhibition Capa in Color presents Robert Capa’s color photographs to the public for the first time. The collection is presented by ICP-International Center of Photography, thanks to the ICP Exhibitions Committee and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Curated by the International Center of Photography of New York, it is produced by Società Ares with the Musei Reali and set up in the Sale Chiablese from 26 September 2020 to 31 January 2021. Although he is recognized almost exclusively as a master of black-and-white photography, Capa began working regularly with color film in 1941 and used it until his death in 1954. While some of this work was published in the magazines of the day, the majority of these images have never been printed or seen in any form. Capa in Color includes over 150 contemporary color prints by Capa, as well as personal papers and tearsheets from the magazines in which the images originally appeared.

Organized by Cynthia Young, Curator of Capa Collections at ICP, the exhibition presents an unexpected aspect of Capa’s career that has been previously edited out of posthumous books and exhibitions, and show how he embraced color photography and integrated it into his work as a photojournalist in the 1940s and 1950s.

Born Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest and naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1946, he was deemed “The Greatest War Photographer in the World” by Picture Post in a late 1938 publication of his Spanish Civil War photographs. During World War II, he worked for such magazines as Collier’s and Life, extensively portraying preparation for war as well as its devastating aftermath. His best-known images symbolized for many the brutality and valor of war and changed the public perception of, and set new standards for, war photography.

On July 27, 1938, while in China for eight months covering the Sino-Japanese war, Robert Capa wrote to a friend at his New York agency, “… send immediately 12 rolls of Kodachrome with all instructions [about] how to use it, filters, etc., … in short, all I should know, because I have an idea for Life”. Although no color film from China survives except for four prints published in the October 17, 1938, issue of Life, Capa was clearly interested in working with color photography even before it was widely used by many other photojournalists.

In 1941, he photographed Ernest Hemingway at his home in Sun Valley, Idaho, in color, and used color for a story about crossing the Atlantic on a freighter with an Allied convoy, published in the Saturday Evening Post. While Capa is best known for the black-and-white images of D-Day, he also used color film sporadically during World War II, most notably to photograph American troops and the French Camel Corps in Tunisia in 1943.

Capa’s use of color film exploded in his postwar stories for magazines such as Holiday (USA), Ladies’ Home Journal (USA), Illustrated (UK), and Epoca (Italy). These photographs, which until now have been seen only in magazine spreads, brought the lives of ordinary and exotic people from around the world to American and European readers alike, and were markedly different from the war reportage that had dominated Capa’s early career. Capa’s technical ability coupled with his engagement with human emotion in his prewar black-and-white stories enabled him to move back and forth between black and white and color film and integrate color to complement the subjects he photographed. These early stories include photographs of Moscow’s Red Square from a 1947 trip to the USSR with writer John Steinbeck and refugees and the lives of new settlers in Israel in 1949–50. For the Generation X project, Capa traveled to Oslo and northern Norway, Essen, and Paris to capture the lives and dreams of youth born before the war.

Capa’s photographs also provided readers a glimpse into more glamorous lifestyles that depended on the allure and seduction of color photography. In 1950, he covered fashionable ski resorts in the Swiss, Austrian, and French Alps, and the stylish French resorts of Biarritz and Deauville for the burgeoning travel market capitalized on by Holiday magazine. He even tried fashion photography by the banks of the Seine and on the Place Vendôme. Capa also photographed actors and directors on European film sets, including Ingrid Bergman in Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, Orson Welles in Black Rose, and John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. Additional portraiture in this period included striking images of Picasso and Giacometti, the former on the beach with his young son Claude and the latter in his studio in Paris. Color imagery was inextricably part of a postwar reconstruction and exuberance.

Capa carried at least two cameras for all of his postwar stories: one with black-and-white film and one with color, using a combination of 35mm and 4x5 Kodachrome and medium-format Ektachrome film, emphasizing the importance of this new medium in his development as a photographer. He continued to work with color to the end of his life, including in Indochina, where he dies in May 1954. His color photographs of Indochina presage the color images that dominated the coverage from Vietnam in the 1960s.

Capa in Color is the first museum exhibition to explore Capa’s fourteen-year engagement with color photography and to assess this work in relation to his career and period in which he worked. His talent with black-and-white composition was prodigious and using color film halfway through his career required a new discipline. Capa in Color explores how he started to see anew with color film and how his work adapted to a new postwar sensibility. The new medium required him to readjust to color compositions, but also to a postwar audience, interested in being entertained and transported to new places.

Download press release and images: bit.ly/CapaInColorMRT

Capa in color

Torino, Musei Reali - Sale Chiablese

26 September 2020 – 31 January 2021

Opening Hours

Tuesday to Friday: 10am – 7pm

Saturday and Sunday: 10am – 9.00 pm

(last entry one hour before)

Admission

Full price: € 13

Concession: € 10 (over 65, teachers)

Children concession: € 5 (from 11 to 18)

Family ticket: up to 2 adults € 10 each + children from 11 to 18 € 5 each

Free: Abbonamento Piemonte Musei, children under 10, disabled, accredited journalists (for request: info@capaincolor)

Tickets can be purchased online at www.capaincolor.it

Booking fee

Individual: € 1,50

Groups: € 18,00

Groups

Booking required until 12 pax at info@capaincolor.it

Groups access only: Tuesday to Friday 9.30-10.00 am and 6.00-7.00 pm, Saturday and Sunday 1.00-2.00 pm

Guided tours

Curated by CoopCulture

(admission fee not included)

Guided tours for schools € 60,00

Tours and educational activity for schools: € 80,00

Info and Booking +39 338 169 1652, info@capaincolor.it

Special Opening

1st October: 10am-9pm

1st November: 10am-9pm

7th December: 10am-7pm

8th December: 10am-9pm

24th December: 10am-5pm

25th December: closed

26th December: 10am-9pm

28th December: 10am-7pm

31th December: 10am-5pm

1st January: 2pm-9pm

4th January: 10am-7pm

6th January: 10am-9pm

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