From war zones to scenes from daily life and a brief trip to Turkey of 1946, a selection of Robert Capa’s photographs taken between 1932-1954 are brought together in Istanbul’s Ara Güler Museum (writes İpek Kozanoğlu). Created in collaboration with Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Liszt Institute-Hungarian Culture Center, the exhibition “Truth is the Best Picture” honours the life of the most important photojournalist of the 20th century.
Capa was born in Budapest in 1913 as Endre Friedman. He became the pioneering photojournalist documenting 20th century’s defining social conflicts as the Spanish Civil War and First War of Indochina. He was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour.
The standout selection for the exhibition is the 37 snapshots taken in Turkey in 1946 for Time Magazine’s ,“March of Time” newsreel and documentary dedicated to capturing life in Turkey on film. Snapshots from the two months the photographer spent in Turkey include scenes from everyday life, Istanbul and Ankara’s landmarks from palaces to mosques, as well as pastoral scenes from different parts of Anatolia.
The exhibition is created as a companion exhibition to the Ara Güler exhibition “On Life” that took place in Budapest in 2024 as part of the commemoration of Hungarian-Turkish relations and culture. Robert Capa’s photography is notable for immortalising frank moments of life and death. The title of the exhibition is a direct reference to the artist’s sober sentimentality as a photographer. The exhibition follows a chronological order, starting with Capa’s first as a photojournalist which was a photo of Leon Trotsky’s giving a speech in Copenhagen in 1932 to the last photo he captured in Indochina before he passed away in 1954 after stepping on a landmine. The exhibition, accompanied by the interviews Capa gave regarding his photographs, weaves a story of Capa’s photography career, his evolution as an artist and construction of his artistic persona, honouring the importance of the artist’s oeuvre in not only documenting and creating a cultural memory of important historical events through a vast visual archive that endows brutal events of history with impactful and unflinching empathy and humanity.
