During my 11 years living in Budapest, Hungary, I walked up and down Nagymező street perhaps a thousand times. Each time, I looked up at the Robert Capa museum and I told myself, “I should really go there.”
As you might know, Robert Capa was one of the most famous and influential photographers of the 20th century. What you might not know is that the man’s real name was Endre Friedmann, and he was Hungarian – hence the museum on Nagymező utca.
I did eventually make it to that museum, and I did eventually find out some curious Robert Capa facts. They might be useful to you if you write or take photos or build elaborate Lego creations.
For example:
Capa published his first photo as a freelance journalist in 1932. The photo showed Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky giving a speech in Copenhagen.
The photo is a little blurry and Trotsky’s hand is in front of his face. But there is an undeniable energy in the shot — you can almost hear the dogmatic and impassioned Marxist on stage.
Capa really made his name a few years later, in 1936. His photograph of a loyalist soldier during the Spanish civil war, falling after being shot, has become one of the most famous photos of the 20th century.
During World War II, Capa took pictures of the Allied landing in Normandy, and he took photos of the liberation of Paris.
After WWII, Capa hung out with and photographed famous and celebrated artists — Henri Matisse, John Steinbeck, Alfred Hitchcock.
There’s a photo from the summer of 1948 that Capa took, which shows an old man grinning as he holds a baby on the beach. It could be any old photo of any old grandpa with his grandson — except that old man is Pablo Picasso, and the grandson is actually Picasso’s son, Claude.
The point is this:
Capa made a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment. Many of his photographs are not technically great or even very good. But they are inherently interesting — even today, almost a hundred years later — because of their content.
The past few days I’ve been promoting my Insight Exposed training. That training talks about the tools to capture snapshots, and the process for developing those snapshots into something valuable.
But what’s the content of those snapshots? If the content is plain, familiar, or uninteresting in itself, you will have to work hard to turn those snapshots into something interesting and insightful.
On the other hand, if you make a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment, you won’t have to be technically great or even very good. Your work will be inherently interesting because of the content. So I talk all about that in the final section of Insight Exposed.
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