Famous photographers’ series continued with George Rodger in the last post, which I came to the story of his meeting with “a friend” in Italy. 

 

Guess who is coming into the story? 

Yes, Capa ☺ 

 

I am continuing Rodger’s story…

 

Meeting with Capa

 

He returned to war, this time in Salerno-Italy. He was going to meet another Life photojournalist in Naples. In fact, both reporters were aware of each other’s work, but had never met before. This reporter was Robert Capa, with whom he would later become a partner in Magnum Photos. They spent six days together on an island, and Capa told him about the idea of ​​establishing a post-war photography cooperative. Rodger explains this as follows;

“That was when we first started talking about a future brotherhood, because he was Life and I was Life and we were not very happy. The object of this brotherhood was that we would be free of all sorts of editorial bias and that we would work on the stories we wanted to work on and have somebody do all the dog body work. He always called me “Old Goat”, I think because on our first meeting, I had been campaigning for three weeks without a wash and maybe I didn’t smell too good, but that stuck. So he said ‘Listen old goat, today doesn’t matter and tomorrow doesn’t matter. It is the end game that counts and what counts is how many chips you’ve got in your pocket, that is if you’re still playing.’ I remember that remark very vividly, very Capa.” 

Later, Rodger and Capa’s ways parted until they met in the liberation of Paris. Rodger first returned to North Africa. Then, he was in the Normandy landing with the British Army, and then in the liberation of Paris, Brussels and the Netherlands in the same year.

 

No more taking war pictures

 

Rodger would have to go through one of the most terrifying experiences of his life while watching the allied forces advance. He was one of the first two reporters to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This horrible experience would make him quit being a war photographer;

“I was with four Tommies in a jeep and amongst the first to get in and the horror of it affected me tremendously. I was talking to a very cultured gentleman and he was absolutely emaciated and in the middle of the conversation he fell down dead. I took a picture of him dead. The dead were lying around, 4,000 of them, and I found I was getting bodies into photographic compositions. And I said my God what has happened to me? It is too much, something has affected me. It had to be photographed because people had to know and so I just couldn’t leave it. And so I just did what I would have done with some landscape or something else, got people into nice compositions and sent the pictures in. But at the same time I swore I would never, never take another war picture and I didn’t. That was the end.” 

Rodger never spoke about Belsen after the war, until many years later, when he read that young people were beginning to doubt the existence of the concentration camps.

 

He later witnessed the liberation of Denmark, and when the war ended, he and his wife Cicely stayed in Paris for a while. Here, he was planning to return to Africa and escape the memories of the war in Europe and Bergen-Belsen.

 

George Rodger, who quit his job at “Life”, was at his home in Cyprus with his wife in 1947 when he received a telegram to join Magnum. 

 

After that, it would be the beginning of a very different story.

 

See what happened next in a different post! 

 

Take care, 

 

Anıl Uzun 

 

Note: In this blog post, I get help from the famous book of Russell Miller. If you want to take a look here is the info; Miller, Russell. Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History, Grove Pres, New York, 1997.