Robert Capa, Photos of Evans Carlson in China, circa 1937 | 罗伯特•卡帕 埃文斯•卡尔逊先生照片三张 摄于中国 约1937年

Arguably the greatest combat photographer in history, Robert Capa (1913-1954) covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the First Indochina War. Renowned for his emotional images of front-line action, he risked his own life whilst documenting and personalizing the struggle of the individual in war.

Robert Capa established his reputation as a war photographer during the Spanish Civil War. The famous photo he took, 'Death of a Loyalist Militiaman' at the Cordoba Front in September 1936, known as 'The Falling Soldier', included in LIFE magazine's 100 Most Influential Images of All Time, was sold in our Paris rooms, 8th November 2019, lot 28.

“The horrific tendency of modern warfare is to depersonalize. Soldiers can use their weapons of mass destruction only because they have learned to conceptualize their victims not as individuals but as a category — the enemy. Capa’s strategy was to repersonalize war — to emphasize that those who suffer the effects of war are individuals with whom the viewer of the photographs cannot help but identify.” — Richard Whelan, 'Robert Capa in Spain', Heart of Spain, Madrid, 1900.