MAGNUM FORCE

`Capa was extremely friendly....he carried a sense of inner euphoria...seemed to having great fun.'

A portrait of Robert Capa by Ruth Orkin in the exhibition `Robert Capa War Photographs' confirms this statement by Geraldine Fitzgerald. His grinning, handsome features could have been those of any film star of the Thirties,' and seemed to fit the part of the devil-may-care, hard drinking, womanising legend in his own, eventful lifetime.

But it is not image that convinced me he was the right person, in the right place, with the right attitude - it was his photography. Only a strong individual, with the visual stamina to match, could have captured those moments of life and death from the Twentieth Century that constituted this exhibition. Capa undoubtedly had integrity; that may have slipped, if he did - as is alleged - stage Death of a Loyalist Militiaman at Cerro Muriano in 1936. That famous and controversial photograph, had to be, and was, in the exhibition - but was almost lost amongst many photographs from the tragedy of war - and the greater tragedies of peacetime. When Capa fought and captured, he used the camera as his weapon. His lens, as is often the case with good photojournalism, proved mightier than the word.

Ernest Hemingway's journalistic prose, stripped of adjectives, gave us a truth about the way human beings were affected and behaved in war. Capa's non-judgemental vision, stripped of polemic, gives us very much the same view. Similarly there are few adjectives in the war photography that Don McCullin and Phillip Jones-Griffith showed us in the 1970's, sandwiched between the chic of the colour supplements. Capa's mentors were most likely to have been Brady and O'Sullivan from the American Civil War. Even the statuesque and heroic `war is hell' set pieces, of Eugene Smith - traditionally composed, grittily printed - are eschewed by Capa for the more intimate and telling moments from peoples' stolen and broken lives. Corpses as the waste products of the war machine, are not on the usual propaganda list for subjects, but Capa disregards this; his Omaha beach 1943 shows the sadness and waste of war, a spiritual link with O'Sullivan's wet plates of Bull Run and more recently, Speilberg's Seeking Private Ryan.

War and strife seem to bring out the best in a Magnum photographer. Capa was a founder member of what came to be an exclusive club for the elite of photojournalism, and was a war photographer to the manor born. Like a soldier he seemed rootless and undirected without the action. His photographs of Japan in the Fifties seem bland when contrasted with those of China at war with Japan in 1938. In the best traditions he was always in the front line during World War Two, but was a fish out of water in the relative calm of wartime Britain - as some rather nondescript photographs in the exhibition taken between 1941 and 1943 show.

A partisan fighting for the humanity of anyone, even those recognised as enemy, Capa shows a captured German soldier, mittens raised in the air in defeat, in a compositional format normally reserved for the victorious. Composition is a way of seeing, said Weston; Capa shows it is also a way of saying, in this case, that we are all the enemy. A small boy carries a blanket on the road from Barcelona to the French border in 1939 - careful choice of framing, by Capa, shows that the road, for the boy, is long. A bizarre humour a la Cartier Bresson/Kertesz creeps in occasionally - a group of men and a boy watch an air raid over Barcelona - one man has a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth. No humour in the Sniper fire in the Place de la Hotel de Ville in Paris 1944. A miscellany of shoes and faces hitting the ground, involves us fixedly in the fear of the moment. This unnerving suspension of time could only be a photographic truth.

Another truth of photography is that it is primarily about the subject. A separate section in the exhibition simply called `Friends,' shows snapshots and only interests because it is William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway. We are not on the higher levels of perception seen, for example, in the staged paranoia's of Brandt's portraits of the famous. Two photographs, however, reveal: Gary Cooper as a fragile city-slicker, delicately crossed-legged in Sun valley, Idaho loses his frontiersman image; Ingrid Bergman - a former lover of Capa - on the set of `Notorious,' neatly divides the fact and fiction of Hollywood. On the left Bergman hypes up her fictional role; Hitchcock and his cameraman, on the right, work for the fact.

As a whole this was a great exhibition, without theatrical effects designed to `sell' to a public who we are often told are `bored' with un-exciting presentations. I could imagine rifles in cabinets, screaming air raid sirens. Thankfully there were just photographs - a maximum of 16x20 size - Capa's 35mm negatives were not pushed beyond the limit for giant, crowd-pleasing prints. He was obviously being taken seriously - pedigree ruled - and the Photographers' Gallery bowed. It is no dramatisation to say Capa's work was causing a sensation amongst the throng, mainly students, when I first viewed the exhibition. I heard the buzz of excitement - saw that curious transcendent light in the eyes; of discovery, delight and hunger for more of this good, food. Perhaps because the photography on show realised real life dramas, up-front, that few in a lifetime will experience, there was intense curiosity - even envy.

This popular accessibility belied the intensity of the photographer's involvement in his subject. Like all great photography, Capa's photographs require many readings. But I had a strong feeling that the aficionados, in the Photographers' Gallery, sensed that the photographs had transcended analysis and were beyond the five-thousand word-strangled thesis. On subsequent visits, I found the Gallery containing even more excited viewers. Almost having to elbow myself in the door, I reflected that I had never seen so many people in the Photographers' Gallery.