Capa to capacapa dark after nothing, reunited with his leg, and with you Taro

If the headline rings a bell, raise your hands and sing along. If it doesn't, then let me tell you what it's all about.

Villa Manin

I have an acoustic duo. We do mostly covers, and try to choose pieces that are a little out of the ordinary. So once I porposed a song by Alt J called Taro. A bit of a weird choice, since the group has a very distinctive style and on top of that the song has like 10 000 words and you need to sing really really fast. It also has strange lyrics, that talks about Indochina, bombs, and two people called Taro and Capa. The lyrics made me curious so I checked them out, and it turns out that these two were a couple, and both of them worked as photographers of war. Both of them were killed young, doing their job in the field. She, or Gerda Taro, was killed first, he, or Robert Capa lived on to be 40, when he was killed by a mine. 

Villa Manin

We practiced the song a lot, we even liked it, but we just couldn't make it work acoustically. In the end it even made us laugh and we did mock versions of it, just for fun. It's ok that it didn't work out, it still taught us something and gave us fun moments. We never played it live, but it'll always remain in our own memories, and that's the best place for a song to be.

This Saturday a friend of mine asked me to go see an art exhibition at Villa Manin at Pordenone. She told me the name of the artist but it didn't ring any bells. I went anyway, since I had nothing to do and Villa Manin is a really cool place. Basically it's this castle with a garden, and some of the coolest bands in the world have played there in the huge yard (e.g. Radiohead).

As we were queuing to get in I asked what was the exhibition about. My friends told me that they were photos. "Photos of what?" " Photos of war" "Ah, ok....and what was the name of the artist again?" "Robert Capa" "Ah, ok". I started thinking, Capa....capacapa....capacapacapa....sounds familiar...and then it hit me. Holy shit it's THE Capa. Suddenly I couldn't wait to see the exhibition and learn more about this dude who had been a part of my Monday night band practice for a few months.

Robert Capa

If you want to know more about Robert Capa, go look it up in internet. I'd like to talk a little about the thoughts the exhibition stirred up in me.

The photos weren't about dead people (well there were a few dead people also, after all, he was photographing the war), but about the people involved in it. Civilians, soldiers, captains, leaders. Moms, dads, children, Chinese, Spanish, German, American. People living the war, everybody in their own way. Pride, happiness, insecurity, loneliness, desperation. People working, people getting by. People who were always running. Nobody complaining in public,and if you saw someone crying it was in the cemetery, like a mother burying her child. I think in that case you're allowed to shed a few tears, right?

I've never experienced a war so it's really hard to understand what it's about, but his photos helped me understand it a little better. All the photos taken from the wars back in the day are in black and white. To me, war is black and white. War has no colors. To me the photos taken today from war zones around the world are almost not real at all. It's like there's not enough suffering because of all the bright colors (which is obviously not true, I'm not saying the suffering has ended since man invented a camera that took colored photos). It's hard to think that colors existed also in the first world war even though they weren't evidenced in the photos. Blood was red also 80 years ago. The grass was green and your gun had a silvery shine to it. There were birds and they had yellow eyes.

Gerda Taro

Another strange thing is that the was sunshine. Did you ever think that during the war there are also sunny days, and you still go to war? There was this film running in a big room inside the villa, where Capa had filmed what I believed were the troops getting ready to invade Omaha Beach. It was a sunny day. Some of the soldiers were actually smiling. It was like they were saying "well, at least it's not raining!" War doesn't happen in gloomy days only, even though you always get that idea from the murky black and white photos. I think there should be some universal law, that if it's a nice day, you take the day off from killing people. You only do it when it's raining, and preferably also in the dark.

Or better yet, let's not do it at all. Like Capa said, "the greatest wish of a war correspondent is to be unemployed".

One of the most touching photos to me was the one of the "last soldier who died in the second WW". Basically the war had already ended, and Capa was with a soldier keeping watch in a tower (or some place high anyway). Suddenly the soldier was killed by a sniper's shot. Before leaving the room Capa took a photo of the dead soldier and named him the last soldier that had died in the war. Capa made sure that his death, in some way even more useless than that of someone dying in combat considering that the war had just ended, would not be in vain. He would live on forever in that photo.

If you ever have the chance to see an exhibition of Robert Capa, or Greta Taro for that matter, go see it, it'll be worth your while. Capa didn't only take meaningful photos, but he also lived an amazing life. He was friends with Picasso, Steinbeck, Hemingway and many more artists of those days, and he even dated Ingrid Bergman. A friend of mine said that it must have been amazing to know all those people, and live in that age in time. I told her that I' d try my best to become famous so that one day she could do an exhibition of photos of us doing silly things at parties. She didn't seem too convinced.

Robert Capa may have died at the early age of 40, but I still think he lived more than I ever will.