‘He invented a style’: war chronicler Robert Capa refashioned himself and revolutionised photography

‘His pictures had to speak’ … A photograph taken by Robert Capa on 18 August 1944 in Chartres, France, of a French woman whose head was shaved because she had a baby by a German soldier. Photograph: Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

It is not often that you get to see a war photographer at work. Certainly not one who more or less defines our idea of the profession as it exists today, is widely considered to be its greatest practitioner and has been dead for more than 70 years.

But as part of its new retrospective, the Museum of the Liberation of Paris has produced a short but remarkable candid film of Robert Capa on the job. He is largely unaware he is being filmed and the cameramen mostly do not know they are filming him.