"Robert Capa. March 18, 1939. The forgotten army in the camp of Argelers" at MUME

From September 10 to December 14, the MUME presents the Robert Capa exhibition. March 18, 1939. The forgotten army in the camp of Argelers, curated by Michel Lefebvre and Grégory Tuban.

Robert Capa made his last report on the Spanish War behind the wires of the French concentration camps. On March 18, 1939, the photojournalist of Hungarian origin Endre Ernő Friedmann (Robert Capa, 1913-1954) returned to find some of the republican fighters locked up in Algerlers and Barcarès. The next day, Capa continues his journey to Bram and Montolieu, meeting the refugees arrested while the conflict continued on the other side of the Pyrenees. He took nearly 300 photographs in two days.

The prestigious English magazine Picture Post published on April 15, 1939, under the title of The Forgotten Army, twenty-four photographs that Robert Capa took in the concentration camps of the Eastern Pyrenees and de l'Aude, of which close to half in Argelers de la Marenda. The rest of the negatives of this report will also be long forgotten. Shortly before his departure for New York in September 1939, Robert Capa entrusted the entirety of his photographs of Spain to a friend who left Europe at war.

In 2007, this photographic background, known as Maleta Mexicana, was found in Mexico. The International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York thus recovered three boxes containing 4500 negatives from the Spanish War. In the middle of this treasure are the ten reels of negatives on the fields. In collaboration with the ICP and the Memorial of the camp of Argelers de la Marenda, the MUME presents this exhibition on these photographic prints, mostly unpublished, following in the footsteps of Robert Capa and this forgotten army in the French fields.