Just an absolutely amazing, wonderfully weird, and truly horrifying memoir by the famous war photographer Robert Capa. Everyone knows his work because at the time of writing this book he’d shot arguably the most famous war photograph of all time, the death of the Republican soldier in Spain in 1936. This photograph is how I ended up reading this book as it’s the subject of a lot of discussion in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. So when I started this book, I figured it would be a kind of book about photography, maybe talking about ideas, theories, etc. Maybe a John Berger kind of thing. Anyway, nope! It barely mentions photopgraphy. We begin with Capa nursing a hangover, getting called a potential spy and traitor by the US goverment, while also receiving a job offer to come to England to shoot for the royal Admiralty. He spends the first chapter trying to get himself to England, resolve his status in the US, and trying to both get drunk and fend off being drunk. Capa ends up being that kind of recognizeable stateless (but fiercely American) figure who is at home in the wooliness of actual American life (at least the kind lived in cities). When he gets to England his status as a displaced Hungarian Jew continues to haunt and chase him but does he care? No! He just wants to get on planes with film and cameras and take pictures. This is a voice that is so much larger than life, that understands that the bureaucracies of the world may control things, but can’t contain them. And of course he’s absolute coward when it comes to women and police officers, but also ran fully into German machine guns without weapons of his own.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95972.Slightly_Out_of_Focus)
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