TEL AVIV.- Robert Capa (1913–1954), once described as "the world's best war photographer," belonged to a small group of prominent 20th-century photojournalists. Capa was born Endre Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest, then Austro-Hungary. At age 17, he was arrested on suspicion of political activity against Regent Miklós Horthy; upon his release, he left for Berlin, where he worked as a darkroom assistant. In 1933, with the rise of Nazi rule, he escaped to Paris, adopted the name Robert Capa, and began working as a freelance photographer. Drawn to the stormy events of the era, especially the early 1930s winds of war in Europe, his passion for extreme human situations fluctuated between a lust for life and a self-destructive drive. He was motivated by identification with simple people who had often lost control over their life and destiny. Capa based himself in Paris but throughout his short life moved between countries and continents and from one war to the next. On 25 May 1954, while documenting the French colonialists waging war against Vietnamese guerrilla forces in Indochina, Capa was killed when he stepped on a landmine. He was 41 years old, and his death reflected his motto: "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough."

The exhibition emphasizes the universal facet of Capa's works, combining the individual and the collective. His photographs exemplify "capturing the moment" and the lack of pretension in presenting the human condition as it is expressed in the battlefields as well as in mundane depictions of everyday moments in life in Israel and overseas, in motifs that recur often and everywhere. The exhibition presents a selection of Capa's works taken in Israel and overseas. Among them, his first photograph, from 1932, of Leon Trotsky; the republican soldier from the Spanish civil war at the moment of his death (a photograph from 1936 which was printed in most newspapers throughout the world and soon became a symbol of anti-fascism and opposition to war in general); the D-day landing on Omaha beach and German snipers shooting at crowds celebrating the liberation of Paris. In 1948 Capa came to Israel to witness and photograph the constitutive historical events. His photographs—including the declaration of independence, the Altalena cargo ship on fire, Begin addressing a crowd, refugees arriving in Israel, the refugee transit camps (ma'abarot)—all outline a nostalgic tour of Israel as it then was: optimistic, naïve, idealistic.

The exhibition will run through the 10th of October 2015 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.