Cornell Capa

NEW YORK - Pioneering photojournalist Cornell Capa, who used the medium to illuminate social and political causes, died Friday at the age of 90, according to the International Center of Photography, which he founded.

Capa, who had Parkinson's disease, died peacefully at his New York City home, ICP said.

Cornell Capa was a Life magazine staff photographer from 1946 to 1954 and later joined the Paris-based Magnum agency, founded by his brother, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others. He served as president of Magnum for four years.

The Hungarian-born photojournalist was best known for his empathetic photo coverage on social topics, including the destruction of native cultures in Latin America, mental retardation in children, the aging of the U.S. population, the Jewish heritage and youthful Wall Street entrepreneurs.

During the 1960s, Capa also produced notable picture essays on the Russian Orthodox church, Moscow Ballet School, Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, and the political campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, John and Robert Kennedy, and Nelson Rockefeller.

Credited with coining the term "Concerned Photographer" to define the concept of using the craft to illuminate humanitarian issues, he also came up with the idea of business firms publishing annual reports, which opened up new work opportunities for Magnum's freelance photographers.

"As a renowned photographer, as the founder of the International Fund for Concerned Photography, and the founder of ICP in 1974, Cornell was a singular force in the world of photography, opening our eyes to the power of the photographic image as an agent of change," ICP said in a statement.

The pinnacle of Capa's creative thinking was ICP, founded in midtown Manhattan in 1974 as a repository for his brother Robert's archives, and to collect, preserve and exhibit the work of others.

Over three decades the ICP has offered hundreds of exhibitions on the history of photojournalism and the work of some 2,500 photographers. After retiring in 1994, Capa retained the title of founding director emeritus of the ICP.

His books included "Farewell to Eden" in 1964, about the vanishing Amahuaca Indians of the Amazon; "The Andean Republics," 1966; "The Concerned Photographer," 1968; "Jerusalem, City of Mankind," 1974, and Capa & Capa: Brothers in Photography," 1990.

Born Cornell Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary, on April 10, 1918, he had ambitions to become a doctor but was drawn to photography by his older brother Andrei, who as Robert Capa would become legendary as a war photographer before he was killed by a land mine in Indochina in 1954.

At 18, Cornell went to Paris as his brother's printer and took his last name. He moved in 1937 to New York, where he joined the new Pix photo agency and worked in the Life magazine darkroom. His first published work was a photo essay on the 1939 New York World's Fair. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Force.


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