Eloquent Album

The time was Christmas Day minus two, 1944; the place, five miles from Bastogne. The swart, short-legged photographer got out of his jeep, climbed an embankment and fired away with his long-lens Contax at some G.I.s advancing across a snow-covered field. Suddenly one yelled and leveled a Tommy gun at him.

Hungarian-born Robert Capa, a friendly enemy alien, was in a tough spot. Hopefully, he yelled back, "Take it easy!" but the trigger-happy G.I., hearing his guttural accent, began to shoot. There was only one thing to do.

"I threw my hands high in the air, yelled 'Kamerad!' and surrendered. Three of them came at me with raised rifles. . . . When they were a rifle's length away from me, I asked one to search my breastpocket. He took out my identification and the special photographer pass signed by Eisenhower himself. . . . I let my hands drop, took their picture and promised it would appear in LIFE magazine."

Troubleshooter. Capa was always getting in & out of such scrapes, partly because his job was to find trouble, and partly because his pidgin-toed English was not always a help. But he came back with pictures that are an eloquent one-man record of World War II. Last week, in Slightly Out of Focus (Henry Holt, 243 pp., $3.50), he assembled an album of the best of them. It opens with a shot of the convoy that he rode to Britain in 1942, and closes with the young machine-gunner he snapped on an open balcony in Leipzig, seconds before the boy was shot between the eyes. ("The last day, some of the best ones die. But those alive will fast forget.")

Few of the pictures bear captions, or need them: the faces of the liberated, the vanquished and the conquerors, alive & dead, speak for themselves. A great picture, by Capa's definition, "is a cut out of the whole event, which will show more of the real truth of the affair to someone who was not there than the whole scene."

Morning Afters. The story that goes with the pictures is spun out in disarmingly unliterary prose, a kind of sardonic self-portrait of a Matthew Brady in paratrooper's boots. It is held together by an elusive, improbable and unresolved love story involving a pink-haired British girl named Elaine (he called her Pinky) and interspersed with morning-after recollections of nights before spent with more-or-less real people with names like Ernie Pyle, Quentin Reynolds and Ernest. Hemingway. At worst, the text can hardly spoil the pictures--or spoil the illusion that all photographers are exasperating but fascinating eccentrics who drink, love and live intensely.

There were no publisher's cocktail parties last week for Author Capa. He was in Moscow with John Steinbeck, on assignment from the New York Herald Tribune. But in the current '47, his friend John Hersey spoke up for him, giving some lowdown that was news even to Capa's publishers. Capa, said Hersey, is "The Man Who Invented Himself." He was thought up in Paris by a poor Hungarian free-lancer named Andrei Friedmann and his sweetheart, Gerda. The better to sell Friedmann's pictures to unwilling French editors, they palmed them off as the work of one Capa, a talented visitor from America. It worked in reverse, too, when they sold Capa to U.S. publishers as a talented Frenchman. Eventually, after his girl Gerda was killed in the Spanish war, Friedmann became the Robert Capa he invented, and the craft of picture journalism has never been quite the same since.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.