HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, HUMANISM & PHOTOGRAPHY

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French humanist photographer, who died on a day like today in 2004.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (22 August 1908-3 August 2004) was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. 

He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.

Cartier-Bresson was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos in 1947. In the 1970s he took up drawing- he had studied painting in the 1920s.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France, the oldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where Henri spent part of his childhood. His mother was descended from Charlotte Corday.

The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Rue de Lisbonne, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau. His parents supported him financially so Henri could pursue photography more freely than his contemporaries. Henri also sketched.

Young Henri took holiday snapshots with a Box Brownie; he later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in traditional French bourgeois fashion, and was required to address his parents with formal vous rather than tu. His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was strong-willed and also feared this prospect.

Cartier-Bresson attended École Fénelon, a Catholic school that prepared students for the Lycée Condorcet. A governess called Miss Kitty who came from across the Channel, instilled in him the love of -and competence in -the English language.

The proctor caught him reading a book by Rimbaud or Mallarmé, and reprimanded him, Let's have no disorder in your studies!. Cartier-Bresson said, He used the informal 'tu', which usually meant you were about to get a good thrashing. But he went on, 'You're going to read in my office.' Well, that wasn't an offer he had to repeat.

Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote's rule-laden approach to art, the rigorous theoretical training later helped him identify and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography.

In the 1920s, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe but each had a different view on the direction photography should take. The Surrealist movement, founded in 1924, was a catalyst for this paradigm shift [vague].

More information: Magnum Photos

Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was drawn to the Surrealist movement's technique of using the subconscious and the immediate to influence their work.

From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson studied art, literature, and English at the University of Cambridge, where he became bilingual.

In 1930 he was conscripted into the French Army and stationed at Le Bourget near Paris, a time about which he later remarked: And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder.

Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in late 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive. That photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.

In early 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and George Rodger founded Magnum Photos. 

Capa's brainchild, Magnum was a cooperative picture agency owned by its members. The team split photo assignments among the members. Rodger, who had quit Life in London after covering World War II, would cover Africa and the Middle East. Chim, who spoke a variety of European languages, would work in Europe. Cartier-Bresson would be assigned to India and China. Vandivert, who had also left Life, would work in America, and Capa would work anywhere that had an assignment. Maria Eisner managed the Paris office and Rita Vandivert, Vandivert's wife, managed the New York office and became Magnum's first president.

Cartier-Bresson died in Céreste (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France) on August 3, 2004, aged 95. No cause of death was announced. He was buried in the local cemetery nearby in Montjustin and was survived by his wife, Martine Franck, and daughter, Mélanie.

More información: ICP

 The photograph itself doesn't interest me.
I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

ROBERT CAPA, THE PHOTOJOURNALISM IN WAR TIMES

Today, The  Grandma has been looking at photos made by one of the best photographs in history, Robert Capa, who is considered the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history, who died on a day like today in 1954.

Robert Capa, born Endre Ernő Friedmann (October 22, 1913-May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist as well as the companion and professional partner of photographer Gerda Taro.

He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.

Capa fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with Gerta Pohorylle. Together they worked under the alias Robert Capa and became photojournalists. Though she contributed too much of the early work, she quickly created her own alias Gerda Taro, and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers.

During his career he risked his life numerous times, most dramatically as the only civilian photographer landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of Paris. His friends and colleagues included Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and director John Huston.

In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Hungary has issued a stamp and a gold coin in his honour.

More information: Magnum Photos

Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann to the Jewish family of Júlia and Dezső Friedmann in Budapest, Austria-Hungary on October 22, 1913. His mother, Julianna Henrietta Berkovits was a native of Nagykapos and Dezső Friedmann came from the Transylvanian village of Csucsa. At the age of 18, he was accused of alleged communist sympathies and was forced to flee Hungary.

He moved to Berlin where he enrolled in Berlin University where he worked part-time as a darkroom assistant for income and then became a staff photographer for the German photographic agency, Dephot. It was during that period that the Nazi Party came into power, which made Capa, a Jew, decide to leave Germany and move to Paris.

He became professionally involved with Gerta Pohorylle, later known as Gerda Taro, a German-Jewish photographer who had moved to Paris for the same reasons he did. The two of them decided to work under the alias Capa at this time. The two of them later separated aliases and published their work independently.

Capa and Taro developed a romantic relationship alongside their professional one. 

Capa proposed and Taro refused, but they continued their involvement. He also shared a darkroom with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he would later co-found the Magnum Photos cooperative.

Capa's first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen on The Meaning of the Russian Revolution in 1932.

From 1936 to 1939, Capa worked in Spain, photographing the Spanish Civil War, along with Gerda Taro, his companion and professional photography partner, and David Seymour.

Taro died when the motor vehicle in which she was travelling, apparently standing on the footboard, collided with an out-of-control tank. She had been returning from a photographic assignment covering the Battle of Brunete.

It was during that war that Capa took the photo now called The Falling Soldier, purporting to show the death of a Republican soldier. The photo was published in magazines in France and then by Life magazine and Picture Post. The authenticity of the photo was later questioned, with evidence including other photos from the scene suggesting it was staged. Picture Post, a pioneering photojournalism magazine published in the United Kingdom, had once described the twenty-five-year-old Capa as the greatest war photographer in the world.

Capa accompanied then journalist and author Ernest Hemingway to photograph the war, which Hemingway would later describe in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Life magazine published an article about Hemingway and his time in Spain, along with numerous photos by Capa.

In December 2007, three boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35 mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Capa, Taro, and Chim (David Seymour), which had been considered lost since 1939, were discovered in Mexico. In 2011, Trisha Ziff directed a film about those images, entitled The Mexican Suitcase.

In 1938, he travelled to the Chinese city of Hankou, now within Wuhan, to document the resistance to the Japanese invasion. He sent his images to Life magazine, which published some of them in its May 23, 1938 issue.

More information: ICP

At the start of World War II, Capa was in New York City, having moved there from Paris to look for work, and to escape Nazi persecution.

On October 7, 1943 Robert Capa was in Naples with Life reporter Will Lang Jr., and there he photographed the Naples post office bombing.

In 1947 Capa travelled to the Soviet Union with his friend, the American writer John Steinbeck. They originally met when they shared a room in an Algiers hotel with other war correspondents before the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. They reconnected in New York, where Steinbeck told him he was thinking about visiting the Soviet Union, now that the war was over.

In 1947, Capa founded the cooperative venture Magnum Photos in Paris with Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Vandivert, David Seymour, and George Rodger. It was a cooperative agency to manage work for and by freelance photographers, and developed a reputation for the excellence of its photo-journalists.

Capa toured Israel during its founding and while it was being attacked by neighbouring states. He took the numerous photographs that accompanied Irwin Shaw's book, Report on Israel.

In the early 1950s, Capa travelled to Japan for an exhibition associated with Magnum Photos. While there, Life magazine asked him to go on assignment to Southeast Asia, where the French had been fighting for eight years in the First Indochina War. Although he had claimed a few years earlier that he was finished with war, Capa accepted the job. He accompanied a French regiment located in Thái Bình Province with two Time-Life journalists, John Mecklin and Jim Lucas.

On 25 May 1954, the regiment was passing through a dangerous area under fire when Capa decided to leave his jeep and go up the road to photograph the advance. Capa was killed when he stepped on a landmine near the road.

He was 40 at the time of his death. He is buried in plot #189 at Amawalk Hill Cemetery, also called Friends Cemetery, Amawalk, Westchester County, New York along with his mother, Julia, and his brother, Cornell Capa.

More information: The Culture Trip

If your pictures aren't good enough,
you aren't close enough.

Robert Capa

IRWIN G. SHAMFOROFF, THE SHORT STORIES AUTHOR

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to read, and she has chosen Irwin Shaw, the American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author, who died on a day like today in 1984.

Irwin Shaw (February 27, 1913-May 16, 1984) was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies.

He is best known for two of his novels: The Young Lions (1948), about the fate of three soldiers during World War II, which was made into a film of the same name starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), about the fate of two brothers and a sister in the post-World War II decades which in 1976 was made into a popular miniseries starring Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, and Susan Blakely.

Shaw was born Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff in the South Bronx, New York City, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents were Rose and Will. His younger brother, David Shaw, became a noted Hollywood producer and writer. Shortly after Irwin's birth, the Shamforoffs moved to Brooklyn. Irwin changed his surname upon entering college. He spent most of his youth in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934.

He began screenwriting in 1935 at age 21. In 1939, he married actress and producer Marian Edwards, daughter of silent film actor Snitz Edwards. The couple divorced in 1967, remarrying two years before Irwin's death in 1982.

During World War II, he was approached by William Wyler to join his film unit. Unable to be commissioned as an officer due to his age and 1-A draft status, Shaw decided to enter the Regular Army. Later, the Army, noting his background, sent him to George Stevens' film unit. He was one of four writers attached to Stevens' command, in which he became a warrant officer. After the war, he returned to his career as a writer.

Shaw died in Davos, Switzerland on May 16, 1984, at age 71, after undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.

Shaw was highly regarded as a short story author, contributing to Collier's, Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines; and 63 of his best stories were collected in Short Stories: Five Decades (Delacorte, 1978), reprinted in 2000 as a 784-page University of Chicago Press paperback.

Among his noted short stories are: Sailor Off The Bremen, The Eighty-Yard Run, and Tip On A Dead Jockey. Three of his stories (The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, The Monument, The Man Who Married a French Wife) were dramatized for the PBS series Great Performances.

In 1950, Shaw wrote a book on Israel with photos by Robert Capa named Report on Israel.

More information: Archive

 There are too many books I haven't read,
too many places I haven't seen,
too many memories I haven't kept long enough.

Irwin Shaw

KATI HORNA, PHOTOGRAPHY FIGHTS AGAINST OBLIVION

Kati Horna

Today, The Grandma is coming back home after visiting Reus. During her trip to Barcelona, she has been reading amazing news about a great discovery in Amsterdam, some boxes full of photo negatives of the Spanish Civil War taken by Kati Horna.

The Grandma has phoned Claire Fontaine, who loves Photography and History, to talk about this discovery and Claire has explained her lots of things about Kati Horna and her incredible work during this terrible war.

Before reading about Kati Horna, The Grandma had been studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 13. Images, diagrams and titles (V) (Spanish Version)

Kati Horna (Budapest, 1912-Mexico, 2000), Jewish immigrant photographer who put her camera at the service of the Social Revolution promoted by the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT-FAI during the Spanish Civil War.

Despite what has been understood in the past, their photographs from the war did not fall into the hands of Franco´s regime, disappear into the ruins or perish during the bombings. They were where they belonged, in the files of the offices where the photographers worked: the Foreign Propaganda Office of the CNT-FAI.

Just before the end of the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica managed to safeguard their archives by sending them to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

The archives, stored in 48 wooden boxes -known at the time as the boxes of Amsterdam- left the Comité Regional building of Barcelona that April. After a long trip with stops in Paris, Harrogate and Oxford, the boxes arrived in Amsterdam in 1947.

Kati Horna worked for CNT-AIT-FAI

Finally safe at the IISH, the archives remained closed for more than thirty years while the CNT survived in secret until the death of the dictator Franco. It was only in the eighties that the material was organized and the inventories created, leaving, however, the photographic material from the Foreign Propaganda Office of the FAI, in the past and relegated to the back of the shelf.

The Photo Archive of the Foreign Propaganda Office remained practically invisible until 2016 when its materials were organized and its inventory created and made public.

When the war broke out the Foreign Propaganda Office of the FAI was located in the building of the Comité Regional in the old Via Durruti in Barcelona, known then as the casa CNT. From the first weeks of the conflict, the FAI offices had a Graphic Department that prioritised photography as a propaganda weapon. This department sourced and bought photographs from independent reporters, for example, Pérez de Rozas (1893-1954) and Finezas (1889-1957). In addition to accessing these photographs, the FAI also had their own photographers, which included, Polish photographer Margaret Michaelis and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna.

The Propaganda Department changed when Kati Horna arrived in January 1937. Then known as Catalina Polgare, she arrived in an anti-fascist Barcelona with her husband at the time, the Hungarian revolutionary Paul Polgare (1911-1964). Once there she became the official photographer for the anarchists and their photo-agency: The Spanish Photo Agency, better known then as Photo SPA. Thanks to this role, her work was published in international magazines such as the British Weekly Illustrated.

More information: Michael Hoppen Gallery

In July'37 Horna left Vía Durruti in Barcelona to move to Valencia and work as a graphic editor for the magazine Umbral. Seven months of hard work in the Foreign Propaganda Offices culminated in the photo album ¿España? Un libro de imágenes sobre cuentos y calumnias fascistas: el álbum de propaganda antifascista and hundreds of negatives taken with her usual rolleiflex camera. This seminal work allows us to better understand her perspective of, and relationship with, the anarchists.

In mid 1938 Kati Horna travelled to Paris to buy photographic material on a trip she would never return from. She was in Paris for a while with her partner José Horna (1909-1963), from whom she took the surname for which she is now known. The couple decided they could not to return to Spain and instead went into exile in Mexico to start a new life. In their move, Horna had to leave her photo archive behind in Vía Durruti, which my research has now identified, forms a part of the archive of the Foreign Propaganda Office of the CNT-FAI.

A girl during the war by Kati Horna

Kati Horna born Katalin Deutsch Blau was born in Budapest and lived in France, Berlin, Spain, and later was naturalized Mexican. Most of her work was lost during the Spanish Civil War. 

She was also one of the most influential women artists and photographers of her time.

Through her photographs she was able to change the way that people viewed war. One way that Horna was able to do this was through the utilization of a strategy called gendered witnessing. Gendered witnessing consisted of putting a more feminine view on the notion that war was a predominantly masculine thing. 

Horna being a women was able to capture the emotions of women and children of war from a different perspective and angle. This in part made her the legendary war photographer that she later became.

Kati Horna was born in Budapest in 1912 during an unstable sociopolitical period; as a result of the First World War, Budapest suffered severe economic setbacks which continued in the years between the wars. Her father was a banker from the prosperous part of Buda and when he died, photography offered Horna the means to earn a living and the chance to fulfill her political ideals. The surrounding violence, danger and injustice of that time influenced her ideology profoundly.

More information: Time

Horna lived in Berlin as a teenager where she met Bertolt Brecht and was influenced by Bauhaus, Surrealism, and Constructivist Lajos Kassak whose views on photography as an agent of social change aligned with Horna's ideology.

At the age of twenty, Horna became an apprentice in the workshop of a renowned photographer József Pecsi. At this most prestigious school in Budapest, she learned basic photographic techniques. She met Robert Capa -then by the name Endre Friedmann- as a teenager in Budapest, and the two photographers remained friends until Capa's death in 1954.

Through the romantic relationship that Horna and Capa shared, Horna was able to gain great insight into the photographic war world. Some of the wars that Capa himself was able to capture included the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Berneri & Barbieri Funeral (Barcelona, 1937) by K. Horna

Horna and Capa were part of the same left-wing political movement and photographed each other's portraits. When Capa moved to Paris, she followed him in 1933, where she turned her attention to the life she saw around her in the streets and cafés of the French capital.

Her series Reportage dans les Cafés de Paris (1934) captured her brilliant eye for irony and fun. While she did several reportages for the French Agence Photo. Her widely known series Flea Markets (1933) and Reportage dans les Cafes de Paris (1934) are from this period. Besides photographing realistic scenes, she also ventured into more experimental works, closer to Surrealism. Even though Horna gained much popularity with her work, she preferred to stay out of the limelight and work for smaller organizations such as Umbral.

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, she moved to Barcelona, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to document the war as well as record the everyday life of communities on the front lines, such as Aragón, València, Madrid, and Lleida. She photographed elderly women, young children, babies and mothers, and was considered visionary for her choice of subject matter.

She was editor of the magazine Umbral -where she met her future husband, the painter and sculptor José Horna. Kati Horna collaborated with other magazines, most of which were anarchic, such as Tiempos Nuevos, Libre-Studio, Mujeres Libres and Tierra y Libertad. Some of her photos were used as posters for the Republican cause.

More information: Art Blart

With José Horna, Kati escaped to Paris in 1939 with a large collection of negatives that would remain unseen until 1979, when democracy in Spain was reestablished. During the Nazi occupation of France, the couple were married and later sought refuge in Mexico, where she met other artists who were also fleeing war-torn Europe: Remedios Varo, Benjamín Péret, Emeric Chiki Weisz, Edward James, Tina Modotti and Leonora Carrington.

Horna arrived in Mexico in October 1939, at the age of 27. Mexico was, for Kati Horna, her motherland and her patriotism was felt only for this country. She remained in Mexico for the rest of her life and was a contributor to magazines such as Todo (1939), Mapa (1940), Enigma (1941), El arte de cocinar (1944), Seguro Social (1944), among others.

Plaça Catalunya, Barcelona by Kati Horna

Nosotros magazine hired her as a full-time photographer in 1944. There she published series like Títeres en la penitenciaría or portraits of Alfonso Reyes in his library.

In 1958, Horna was the chief photo editor of Mujeres magazine. During the second half of the 20th century she also did sporadic commissions for Revista de la Universidad de México, Mexico This Month, Tiempo, S.nob, Mujer de Hoy, Revista de Revistas, Diseño, Vanidades, Arquitectura, Arquitectos de México, Obras.

She also carried out more experimental projects that bear the imprint of surrealism.

More information: Sothebys

Architecture was another field that Kati Horna explored with interest. She collaborated with various architects like Luis Barragán, Carlos Lazo and Ricardo Legorreta, and documented buildings with historical value in order to provide a register of their conditions.

Horna also published photos of recently inaugurated public buildings, like the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Ciudad Universitaria, Biblioteca Nacional. In 1967, Kati Horna took photos of the Pre-Olympics for architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.

She was also a recognized professor at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the Academia de San Carlos and the Universidad Iberoamericana, between 1958 and 1963. Some of her most well-known works include What Goes in the Basket (1939), La Castañeda (1945), Fetiches (1962), Ode to Necrophilia (1962), Sucedió en Coyoacán (1962), Mujer y Máscara (1963), and Una Noche en el Sanatorio de Muñecas (1963).

Kati Horna died in October 2000. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions in Mexico, Spain, and other countries.

More information: The Guardian

A true photograph need not be explained,
nor can it be contained in words.

Ansel Adams

GERDA TARO: PHOTOJOURNALISM DURING THE WAR

Gerta Pohorylle aka Gerda Taro

Dedicated to Jordi Borràs. 

Ni un pas enrere!

Today, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Chapter 29).

More information: It/There I , II & III

In the evening, The Grandma has had dinner with Claire Fontaine and they have been talking about Gerda Taro, the German photojournalist who died on a day like today in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Claire and The Grandma admire Taro and her photos and they want to talk about her and her work.

Gerda Taro (1 August 1910, Stuttgart, Germany-26 July 1937, near Brunete, Spain) was a German war photographer, and the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa. Her real name was real name Gerta Pohorylle. Taro is regarded as the first female photojournalist to cover the front lines of a war and to die while doing so. She heavily contributed to the early days of the work accredited to the alias Robert Capa.

Gerta Pohorylle was born in 1910 in Stuttgart, Kingdom of Württemberg, into a middle-class Jewish Galician family. Pohorylle attended a Swiss boarding school. In 1929, the family moved to Leipzig, just prior to the beginning of Nazi Germany. Taro opposed the Nazi Party, joining leftist groups. 

Gerda Taro

In 1933, she was arrested and detained for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. Eventually, the entire Pohorylle household was forced to leave Nazi Germany toward different destinations. Taro would not see her family again.

Escaping the anti-Semitism of Hitler's Germany, Pohorylle moved to Paris in 1934. In 1935, she met the photojournalist Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, learning photography and becoming his personal assistant. They fell in love. Pohorylle began to work for Alliance Photo as a picture editor.

In 1936, Pohorylle received her first photojournalist credential. Then, she and Friedmann devised a plan. Both took news photographs, but these were sold as the work of the non-existent American photographer Robert Capa, which was a convenient name overcoming the increasing political intolerance prevailing in Europe and belonging in the lucrative American market.

Capa was derived from Friedmann's Budapest street nickname Cápa which means Shark in Hungarian. The secret did not last long, but Friedman kept the more commercial name Capa for his own name, while Pohorylle adopted the professional name of Gerda Taro after the Japanese artist Tarō Okamoto and Swedish actress Greta Garbo. 

More information: BBC

The two worked together to cover the events surrounding the coming to power of the Popular Front in 1930s France.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out (1936), Gerda Taro travelled to Barcelona to cover the events with Capa and David Chim Seymour. Taro acquired the nickname of La pequeña rubia , The little blonde. They covered the war together at northeastern Aragon and at the southern Córdoba.

 

Gerda Taro & Robert Capa

Always together under the common, bogus signature of Robert Capa, they were successful through many important publications, the Swiss Züricher Illustrierte, the French Vu. 

Their early war photos are distinguishable since Taro used a Rollei camera which rendered squared photographs while Capa produced rectangular Leica pictures. However, for some time in 1937 they produced similar 135 film pictures together under the label of Capa&Taro.

Subsequently, Taro attained some independence. She refused Capa's marriage proposal. Also, she became publicly related to the circle of anti fascist European intellectuals, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, who crusaded particularly for the Spanish Republic.

The Ce Soir, a leftist newspaper of France, signed her for publishing Taro's works only. Then, she began to commercialize her production under the Photo Taro label. Regards, Life, Illustrated London News and Volks-Illustrierte were amongst those publications. 

Reporting the Valencia bombing alone, Gerda Taro attained the photographs which are her most celebrated. Also, in July 1937, Taro's photographs were in demand by the international press when, alone, she was covering the Brunete region near Madrid for Ce Soir.

More information: The Telegraph

Although the Nationalist propaganda claimed that the region was under its control, the Republican forces had in fact forced that faction out. Taro's camera was the only testimony of the actual situation.

During her coverage of the Republican army retreat at the Battle of Brunete, Taro hopped onto the footboard of a car that was carrying wounded soldiers, then a Republican tank crashed into its side. Taro suffered critical wounds and died the next day, July 26, 1937. 

Gerda Taro

The circumstances of Taro's death have been questioned by British journalist Robin Stummer, writing in the New Statesman magazine.  

Stummer cited Willy Brandt, later Chancellor of West Germany, and a friend of Taro's during the Spanish Civil War, saying that she had been the victim of the Stalinist purge of Communists and Socialists in Spain not aligned to Moscow. However, Stummer provided no other evidence for this claim.

In an interview with the Spanish daily El País, a nephew of a Republican soldier at the Battle of Brunete explained that she had died in an accident. According to the eye-witness account, she had been run over by a reversing tank and she died from her wounds in El Goloso English hospital a few hours later.

Due to her political commitment, Taro had become an anti-fascist figure. On August 1, 1937, on what would have been her 27th birthday, the French Communist Party gave her a grand funeral in Paris, buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery, and commissioned Alberto Giacometti to create a monument for her grave.

More information: The New York Times

 

 In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; 

you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on. 

Robert Capa