Genre-Defining Robert Capa Photo Book Gets Reissue

Death in the Making by Robert Capa, first published in 1938, was a pivotal publication in photojournalism, taking a much closer and partisan look at the combatants of war.

Director of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography Cynthia Young tells PetaPixel that the ICP is reissuing the book with Damiani to make the iconic book available to the public.

“The original 1938 edition is quite rare, expensive, and hard to find, and copies with a dust jacket even more so,” says Young. “It also seemed like the Spanish Republican fight against fascism in the 1930s has relevance to today’s political climate.”

Death in the Making, which features Capa’s famous Falling Soldier on the front cover, was a turning point because it took a fresh approach to photojournalism: the photographs move between soldiers, civilians, refugees, destruction, and everyday life.

It’s not neutral reporting either: the book is explicitly sympathetic to the Republican cause fighting Franco’s fascist forces and was partly intended to generate international sympathy and support for Republican Spain.

“The images in the book honor the Spaniards who committed themselves to the fight against Franco’s attack against the democratically elected government,” says Young.

“They are soldiers who carry guns, talk to priests and continue the harvest; women who inventory art and work in factories; stoic women of all ages; families on the roads fleeing indiscriminate bombings and walking toward an unknown future. It is a story of a country surviving a brutal civil war.”

The 1938 version of Death in the Making didn’t carry captions or specific photographer credits when, in fact, three photographers contributed to it: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour. Seymour, a Polish photographer who met Capa in Paris, has 13 images in the book.

“We started with a checklist of all the images and researched the attribution, location, and date to all of them,” explains Young. “Much of this work came out of the research done previously on the Mexican Suitcase negatives.”

“As the original book does not have captions to any of the images and the text is not always related to the image, the back of the new book has thumbnails of all the images with the caption information,” she adds.

Death in the Making is copublished by Damiani and the ICP.