Rural highway, USA, 1959

Cornell Capa (1918-2008) was born Cornell Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest. In 1936, he moved to Paris, where his brother Andre (Robert Capa) was working as a photojournalist. Capa worked as his brother’s printer until 1937, then moved to New York to join the new Pix photo agency. In 1938, he began working in the Life darkroom. Soon his first photo-story on the New York World’s Fair was published in Picture Post.

In 1946, after serving in the US Air Force, Cornell became a Life staff photographer. In 1954 he joined Magnum, and when David ‘Chim’ Seymour died in Suez in 1956 Capa took over as president of Magnum, a post he held until 1960.

While working for Life, Capa made the first of several Latin American trips, which continued through the 1970s. Capa covered the electoral campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller, among others.