"Robert Capa, Historical Figures" is a journey into his life, an accurate and unedited overview of the most intense portraits made by the famous photojournalist, who founded Magnum Photos, during his career from 1932 to 1954. Capa is known chiefly as a war photographer, but of the 70,000 exposures he made during his life, a good number are portraits, not just of famous personalities, but of common men and women, actors, at times silent, in history.
An interest in the "human factor" was always key to Robert Capa, who with curiosity and attentiveness tried to understand and to relate history through the looks and the faces of the people who decided history, or more often, those who endured it.
Through those who shaped an epoch we revisit the story of a man, and of the people he met, bound up with the history of the century that has just closed. There are portraits of figures in the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War as recorded in England, the North African Front, Italy and Europe.
A special selection of 26 photographs is dedicated to the Italian campaign, an examination within the exhibition.
After this are the photographs of the Liberation in August 1944, postwar Europe, his trip to the Soviet Union with Steinbeck, the birth of the State of Israel up to his las pictures in Indo-China. A special selection of portraits is dedicated to his friends: Ingrid Bergman, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Matisse, Faulkner...
Overall, the exhibition is divided into six sections: the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, the Italian Front, the birth of Israel, his friends, his last photographs.
"Historical Figures" is one of the most important cultural events to be hosted in Sicily in recent years. The Leonardo Sciascia Foundation, together with Contrasto and with Magnum Photos, have placed great faith in the value of this project and in the possibility of generating the same interest in Sicily, in the native town and source of inspiration of the great writer of "memory", who had written an article on Capa in the newspaper L'Ora at the end of the '60s, as that encountered in Milan over the past months.
It is natural that a major exhibition should be held in Racalmuto, and this event will surely be followed by others.