The many covers that Capa shot for the magazine included portraits of television personality Jack Paar, painter Grandma Moses, and Clark Gable.

Capa also produced a book documenting the first 100 days of the Kennedy presidency, with fellow Magnum photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt.

Capa wrote, "It took me some time to realize that the camera is a mere tool, capable of many uses, and at last I understood that, for me, its role, its power, and its duty are to comment, describe, provoke discussion, awaken conscience, evoke sympathy, spotlight human misery and joy which otherwise would pass unseen, un-understood and unnoticed.

"[7] Capa, for Life magazine, was the first to publish a photo essay of the five missionaries killed by the Waodani, known as Operation Auca, in the eastern rain forest of Ecuador in 1956 that made world headlines.

Among the many events and causes Capa documented were the oppression of the Perón regime in Argentina and the subsequent revolution, Israel's Six-Day War, the plight of the Russian Orthodox Church under Soviet rule, and the education of mentally retarded children.