Robert Capa's Mexican Suitcase

In 1936, Robert Capa went with his girlfriend Gerda Taro to Spain to photograph the civil war there. One of the shots to come out of this trip, which may be his most famous and striking photograph, is a photo of a Spanish Republican soldier at the instant he was shot, falling backwards and about to drop his rifle. Commonly known as "The Falling Soldier," when it was published, in 1936, no one had seen anything like it.

In October 1939, as the German army approached Paris, Robert Capa escaped to America to avoid capture by the Nazis, leaving his negatives at his studio. Capa's darkroom manager Imre Weiss later recalled: "In 1939, when the Germans approached Paris, I put all Bob's negatives in a rucksack and bicycled it to Bordeaux to try to get it on a ship to Mexico. I met a Chilean in the street and asked him to take my film packages to his consulate for safekeeping. He agreed."

Many years passed...

In 1995, three cardboard boxes containing the lost Robert Capa negatives, were discovered to be in the possession of a Mexican family, descendants of a Mexican general and diplomat.

It came to be called the "Mexican Suitcase," and it contained negatives by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour. After much negotiation, the three boxes of negatives from the "Mexican Suitcase" were donated to the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, an organization founded by Cornell Capa, Robert's brother.

See images from the Mexican Suitcase online at the ICP's Mexican Suitcase gallery.

The discovery of the negatives has reignited the controversy over "The Falling Soldier."  Was it faked?

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Postscript:
In 1954, Capa went to Indochina (now known as Vietnam) to photograph the French war there for Life magazine. On May 25, 1954, he was travelling with a convoy in the Red River Delta. When the convoy stopped, Capa followed a group of soldiers into a field to get some photos. He took at least one photo, which survives, before he stepped on a land mine and was killed.

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A good Robert Capa book

Robert Capa: Photographs (Aperture Monograph) -- This is an excellent thought-provoking, but unpleasant, book of Capa photos. The focus is on his war photography, which can be disturbing, but it does include some of his other work, such as Paris after the war, and his celebrity friends, including Hemingway, Picasso, Humphrey Bogart, and John Huston. There is just enough, but not too much, text. 192 pages.

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