Remembering Robert Capa on his birthday 🎂
📷 Alfred Eisenstaedt, New York, 1942
"If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough."
One of the greatest of movie set photographs, by Robert Capa: Ingrid Bergman & Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Notorious, 1946. It's been suggested that Capa's love affair with Bergman was the genesis of a Hitchcock film made 8 years later: Rear Window.
Ingrid Bergman was in the middle of a torrid love affair with the great photographer Robert Capa when he took these photographs on the Notorious set, 1946. What a look she gives him!
Ingrid Bergman was on the set of Roberto Rossellini's Fear when she got the telegram telling her that Robert Capa had been killed by a landmine in Indochina, on May 25, 1954.
Happier times: Ingrid Bergman & Robert Capa in Berlin, 1945. Photo by Carl Goodwin.
A "portrait impromptu" of Robert Capa by Willy Ronis. The two met in Switzerland, "on the slopes of Mont-Joux", in 1939, & took each other's pictures. When Ronis heard of Capa's death in 1954 he tracked down this negative.
Robert Capa gives us a film set perspective we don't often see: on the set of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, 1946.
I love these silhouette shots of Alfred Hitchcock & Cary Grant on the set of Notorious, 1946. The still photographer on the set was the great Robert Capa; I think we can safely credit these to him.
Ernest Hemingway arguing with Robert Capa about his photographs. He didn't like Capa always shooting him with a drink in his hand.
📷 Lloyd Arnold, Ketchum, Idaho, 1940
Like this!
Ernest Hemingway by Robert Capa, 1937
There were two still photographers on the set of John Huston's 1953 film Beat the Devil: Eric Gray & the great Robert Capa. I suspect Capa may have taken some of these shots.
A game of poker, London, Spring of 1944.
From the left: William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, George Stevens, Robert Capa
Drawing by Alan Reeve
It wasn't all beautiful movie stars & crafts services for Robert Capa. He also famously placed himself in the middle of the action: here in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, & at Omaha Beach on D-Day, 1944.
According to one theory, Hitchcock added details about Ingrid Bergman & Robert Capa's relationship to John Michael Hayes' script for Rear Window, made in 1954. So Jeff Jefferies (James Stewart) & Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) would have some characteristics of Capa & Bergman.
I've never been able to track down who took this race-track action shot that shows up in Rear Window's opening montage. Clever film-making by Hitchcock to give a back-story for Jeff's broken leg.
Robert Capa?
Robert Capa & Ingrid Bergman were together from 1943 to the summer of 1946. He took this shot of the great actress on the set of her next film, Arch of Triumph. It's dated July-October 1946, so perhaps it's by way of a farewell.
Another wonderful shot of Ingrid Bergman by Robert Capa, on the set of Arch of Triumph in 1946. The two were nearing the end of their affair.
Robert Capa
June 6, 1944: US troops assault Omaha Beach during the #DDay landings
Robert Capa returned to England on June 7th, but was back in Normandy on the 8th. Here's a shot of captured German soldiers from later that month. #DDay
Coffee with Robert Capa ☕️
His photo of a table setting in the Tchaikovsky House, Klin, USSR, 1947
Robert Capa
Watching the #RemembranceDay Parade
Paris, November 11, 1936
Ava Gardner by Robert Capa, 1954
Robert Capa
Ava Gardner on the set of The Barefoot Contessa
Tivoli, 1954
Robert Capa
A Dior model at the Place Vendôme, 1948
Robert Capa
Model wearing Dior, on the banks of the Seine, 1948
There's something timeless about Capa's colour fashion shots.
A US soldier with a German prisoner of war during the Battle of the Bulge
📷 Robert Capa, near Bastogne, December 23, 1944
Robert Capa photographs John Steinbeck
Moscow, 1947
Two of the founders of Magnum Photos, taken by a third: Robert Capa & David Seymour by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Place du Tertre, Montmartre, 1952.
Today we're celebrating the birthday of Robert Capa 🎂
That's Henri Cartier-Bresson on the right, in this Robert Capa photo from Alberto Giacometti's studio, 1952
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Remembering Doris Lessing on her birthday 🎂
📷 Roger Mayne, 1959 @NPGLondon
"Doris Lessing is the ideal winner of the Nobel Prize. After all, the prize is about idealism, & was founded in the belief that writers can make the world a better place."
- Tom Payne
Doris Lessing by Marianne Majerus, 1984 @NPGLondon
"What luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking & startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, ... the grace & charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss."
What a lovely portrait of Doris Lessing, by Toby Melville.
"She was adept at tracing sly signs of continuity where that particular path through the narrative woods had been overgrown and bypassed time out of mind – not least by Lessing."
- Lorna Sage
Remembering Sarah Bernhardt on her birthday 🎂
📷 Nadar, c.1865
"Her performances were legendary and her affairs lurid, matched only by a prodigious ability to convert both into hard cash."
- Olivia Laing
Manuel Orazi
Coffee with Sarah Bernhardt, c.1895 ☕️
Celebrate the Malcolm Arnold Centennial! 🎂💯
📷 Erich Auerbach, 1968
"Against the background of the postwar trend towards the ascetic, the cerebral & the experimental, his music gave immediate & unconditional enjoyment to performers & listeners alike."
- Christopher Mowat
Malcolm Henry Arnold by Neil Drabble, 1991 @NPGLondon#MalcolmArnold100
He won an #Oscar for his score to The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957
Malcolm Arnold was an accomplished conductor, of his own & others' scores. Here's a great process shot: recording the score for The Battle of Britain, with composer William Walton & director Guy Hamilton
📷 Jim Gray, Denham Studios, 1969
Remembering Georg Solti on his birthday 🎂
📷 Patrick Lichfield, 1982 @NPGLondon
"The central feature of the Solti-Chicago success was the sheer stunning quality of the playing, which few other groups could rival."
- James R. Oestreich
Georg Solti by Erich Auerbach, 1963
"Often he is greeted with more bravos for showing his face than some of his colleagues receive for showing their stuff."
- Stephen E. Rubin
Georg Solti by Erich Lessing, Palais Garnier, Paris, 1973
"When I learn a piece, I know how it *should* sound. How much I get out of that *should* is a question of talent, experience, & perseverance - just never giving up."
Remembering Dizzy Gillespie on his birthday 🎂
📷 Ted Williams, 1960
"His improvising was eruptive; suddenly, a line would bolt into the high register, only to come tumbling down."
- Peter Watrous
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie are Horn Players
1982
Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie, in one of the great jazz photographs, by Herman Leonard, New York, 1949
All the Things You Are, from 1945: