Excerpt from the 1959 Dateline on the Robert Capa Gold Medal:
The Robert Capa Award
This award, which keeps alive a memory that needs no nudging, goes again to a man who kept his mind on his work.
Photographers who can read (and there are more of them than you might think) must wonder sometimes why this guy gets prizes and that guy does not. The answer probably is that the guy who got the prize was the guy whose pictures were used. They’re all heroes, in an unrecognized, second-class-citizen way, and not a one of them would belittle an award made for performance in the tradition of Bob Capa. Paul Bruck, this year’s winner, qualifies for what the awards committee judged to be “superlative motion picture photography achieved despite the difficulties of shooting his story while under fire during the Lebanon street fighting.” Bruck is a Viennese whose schooling was stopped because he couldn’t qualify under Hitler’s race-standards. He did his time in forced labor and in the German army and in forced labor again. When Hitler’s film ran out, Bruck went to work for Warner-Pathe News, won a 1953 prize at the Vienna Biennale and wound up in 1954 with CBS. The operation in the Lebanon may not have been such great shakes as a war, but Bruck was there and he shot his story. More power to him.