NEW YORK — The man on the other end of the line was a well-known novelist. Before that, he’d been a well-known war correspondent. I was calling him to ask him to review a new biography. This was 30 years ago.
The novelist hemmed (he was busy with his own writing). The novelist hawed (he really didn’t have time). Still, he didn’t want to seem rude. So before saying no, he asked who the subject of the biography was. Robert Capa, I told him. The intake of breath was small but audible. “Sure, I’ll do it,” the novelist said. That’s the kind of irresistible figure the most legendary of war photographers was back then — and remains even now, 60 years after his death.
Capa, darkly handsome and suavely charming. Capa, who went ashore with the first wave on D-day and said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” Capa, Ernest Hemingway’s pal and Ingrid Bergman’s lover. Capa, cofounder of Magnum, the most celebrated of photo agencies. Capa, who died at 40, after stepping on a land mine in what was then French Indochina.
That was a black-and-white Capa. Photojournalism in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s was almost all in black and white. The classic Capa images – from the Spanish Civil War, from D-day, of Hemingway and Picasso – are all in black and white. But not all Capa images are in black and white. That’s the revelation of “Capa in Color,” which runs at the International Center of Photography through May 4.
The effect is akin to encountering an acquaintance you’ve previously seen always attired in casual (if stylish) clothes, and now he’s all decked out in dressy, expensive duds. It’s exciting — and a bit disconcerting.
Sheer novelty makes the work disconcerting, of course — and so does its nature. “Capa in Color,” which comprises more than a hundred photographs, as well as vintage magazines, letters, and telegrams, doesn’t show him at his best or most characteristic. What it does do is show Capa at his most glamorous and vivid.
In 1938, Capa was in China, covering the Sino-Japanese war. This was two years after the invention of Kodachrome color film. He asked to be sent a dozen rolls. Four color images appeared in Life magazine later that year.
The earliest photographs in the show Capa took in England, North Africa, and the North Atlantic, between 1941 and 1943. He uses color to excellent effect: the whiteness of fire-dousing foam on a bomber that’s crash-landed; the blackness of the Maltese crosses in a German military cemetery; the redness of the border of a captured Nazi flag. The colors serve to complete the picture. Capa’s demonstrating that the mastery of dynamism and composition evident in his black-and-white work has a chromatic counterpart.
Something happens with the war’s end. While always diverting and expert, the work becomes a bit weightless. It’s agreeable to see famous faces doing interesting or amusing things (Hemingway sipping from a flask, Picasso at the beach, Bergman on set, Humphrey Bogart palling around with Peter Lorre, Ava Gardner applying lipstick). It’s no less agreeable to see famous places (Rome, Paris, London). There’s the occasional knockout image. The outline of a skier’s body chimes with the shape of the Matterhorn behind her. Spectators at Longchamp Racecourse are a show unto themselves. You sense the connection to the scene that must have been felt by Capa, who was known to play the ponies himself.
For the most part, though, what announces itself is the absence of feeling. Travelogue and celebrity features paid the bills but they didn’t bring out the best in Capa. He wasn’t just treading water, he was treading perfumed water. He knew it, too. In 1953, he wrote to a friend of the need to “get back to real work, and soon. What and where I do not know, but the [resorts] Deauville and Biarritz and motley movie period is over.”
The what and where were war in Indochina. “Capa in Color” ends with a handful of photos from his last day. They have a weight and poignancy unlike anything else in the show. Part of that, of course, is knowing what’s about to befall Capa — and the two decades of conflict to follow. But somehow what we see — the striding men in uniform, the grass waving in the wind, the unforgiving blue of the sky — transcends biography and geopolitics.
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“What Is a Photograph?,” the other show currently at ICP, could hardly differ more. Capa’s work, good, bad, or indifferent, was about photography as a means to an end: documenting the external world. The work in “What Is a Photograph?” is about photography as a means unto itself. The show looks at nontraditional approaches to the medium since the 1970s.
Among the 21 artists are some very well-known names (Gerhard Richter, Lucas Samaras, Sigmar Polke), though names not primarily known for their forays into photography. The emphasis is on how rather than who or what. The photographs here are printed over, drawn on, collaged, taken from video, given dimensionality, manipulated, or otherwise fiddled with in the darkroom. One is reminded of Magritte’s famous painting “This Is Not a Pipe,” only in reverse. That painting shows a pipe, but it’s not itself a pipe. These photographs don’t look like photographs, but that’s what they are. Consider it a useful aesthetic rule of thumb: When entelechy bumps into epistemology, watch out! Seen in this context, Christopher Williams’s “Supplement ’13 (Mixed Typologies) #3,” with its array of advertising images of cameras and photographic equipment, stands out as much as the Matterhorn does in that Capa picture, and even more pleasingly.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.