Robert Capa valuation

Robert Capa (1913–1954) was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, and moved to Berlin and then Paris, where he worked with his partner, the photographer Gerda Taro. His picture from the Spanish Civil War known as The Falling Soldier (1936) made his name, and he went on to cover the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the First Indochina War. He landed with American troops on Omaha Beach on D-Day and photographed the liberation of Paris. He wrote a war memoir, Slightly Out of Focus, received the Medal of Freedom in 1947 and co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris that year.

What comes to market is mostly gelatin silver prints, and most of them were made after his lifetime. Prints made during his life are scarce and are treated very differently from later ones, so a buyer will want to know when and by whom a print was made and what stamps and inscriptions it carries on the reverse. Press prints with agency stamps form a separate category. The International Center of Photography in New York holds a large archive of his work. Prints should be checked for silvering, creases and tears at the edges.