Robert Capa began using color film regularly in 1941 and continued until his death in 1954. Yet his reputation remains anchored in black-and-white images of conflict. Capa in Color, published by Prestel in 2014, restores this parallel practice to view, presenting color not as a peripheral experiment but as an integral element of his wartime and, especially, postwar career. Many of the photographs gathered here had previously remained unpublished or unseen.
The change of medium coincided with a change in subject and audience. Alongside early color work from the Second World War, Capa photographed postwar life in the USSR, Budapest, and Israel. He also entered the expanding editorial worlds of travel, leisure, fashion, and cinema: Alpine ski resorts, Biarritz and Deauville, fashion studies in Paris, and informal moments with Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, and John Huston. These assignments show a photographer responding to picture magazines whose readers increasingly sought diversion, mobility, and access to distant places.
Color required more than a different film stock. It altered the organization of the frame and intensified the appeal of clothing, landscape, architecture, and social display. Capa’s established attentiveness to gesture and emotion remains present, but it is redirected toward the atmosphere of postwar modernity. The resulting photographs complicate the familiar division between serious reportage and magazine entertainment: glamour and ordinary life appear within the same evolving practice.
For collectors concerned with the history of photojournalism and the photobook, this 208-page hardcover deserves attention because it materially broadens the record of a canonical photographer. Rather than repeating the images on which Capa’s fame rests, it documents how he adapted his visual language to color, new commissions, and a transformed media culture. Its significance lies in that revision: a more complete account of Capa’s working life, and a focused study of color’s place in mid-century editorial photography.
