Musei Reali Torino
“Truth is the best image, the best propaganda”. With these famous words Robert Capa (Budapest 1913 – Tay Ninh 1954), affirms the importance of the photographic medium as a weapon of testimony and denunciation. Universally known as an emblematic figure of the war photojournalist, Capa documented in black and white the main conflicts of the twentieth century, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II, from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the first Indochina war.
He experimented with the use of colour while he was on the front line of the second Sino-Japanese war, with an aesthetic that had become reality. He was a man always ready to measure himself against misery, chaos and history, until his death in 1954 in Vietnam.
His colour imagery was an indissoluble part of the reconstruction and vitality of the post-war period, and expressed a pleasure in capturing life whith his surprisingly light creative path that had formed in the dramatic chiaroscuro of human dramas.
After the Second World War, Capa’s activity was oriented exclusively towards the use of colour films, especially for photographs destined for magazines of the time such as the American Holiday and Ladies’ Home Journal, the English Illustrated, and in Italia Epoca.
Among these early works are the photographs of Moscow’s Red Square, taken during a trip to the USSR in 1947 with writer John Steinbeck and the life of the first settlers in Israel in 1949-50. In the same period, he portrayed the most fashionable ski resorts in the Swiss, Austrian and French Alps, and the fascinating French beaches of Biarritz and Deauville for the thriving tourist market presented by Holiday magazine.
The Capa in colour exhibition presents, for the first time in Italy, 150 colour shots of the great Ungarian naturalized American, a legendary figure of 20th century photojournalism and founder in 1947 with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, Georges Rodger and William Vandivert of the Magnum Photos agency.
Curated by the International Centre of Photography in New York it is produced by Ares Society with the Royal Museums of Turin and set up in the Chiablese Rooms until 31 January 2021