New-York, Dec 11, 2007
Walked by the International Center of Photography. Couldn’t resist to go in: photo exhibition on the Spanish Civil War. For some reason, I have a fascination with this; it has carried on for the last 40 years. The human drama, guns against bombs; prelude to WWII; la passionara, the international brigades; Norman Bethune, Ernest Hemingway; Guernica, Picasso, Frederico Garcia Lorca, all of that has made it an obsession for me. Books after books, films after films. And it is still there.
Today, discovered Gerda Taro. She lived in the shadow of Robert Capa who immortalized the civil war in the mind of humanity with his shot “the death of a Loyalist Militiaman”, as the latter was receiving a mortal bullet.
Taro and Capa were an item, both from eastern Europe (Hungary for him, Germany for her I think), in exile in Paris when, leaning to the left (perhaps more than leaning), they decided to cover the Spanish civil war and went there together in the summer of 1936. Taro was very much a photographer of her own, and this exhibition is about her, based in good part on negatives that were recently found or bought by the Center (got the exhibition book). Her career was short though: they returned to Spain in 1937; she was covering a major battle just out of Madrid when she died in one of these freak accident, crushed between a car, which she was riding on the sideboard, and a loyalist tank out of control!
Also on display, Capa at war - Spain, China, D-Day; as it should he died victim of a mine in Vietnam in 1954
This is what the Center has to say about Taro:
“Gerda Taro (1910-1937) was a pioneering photojournalist whose brief career consisted almost exclusively of dramatic photographs from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. Her photographs were widely reproduced in the French leftist press, and incorporated the dynamic camera angles of New Vision photography as well as a physical and emotional closeness to her subject. Taro worked alongside Robert Capa, who was her photographic as well as romantic partner, and the two collaborated closely. While covering the crucial battle of Brunete in July 1937, Taro was struck by a tank and killed. Taro's photographs are a striking but little-known record of this important moment in the history of war photography. ICP now holds what is by far the world's largest collection of her work, including approximately 200 prints as well as original negatives. This exhibition will include vintage and modern prints, and magazine layouts using Taro's images. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 184-page ICP/Steidl catalogue, the first major collected document of Gerda Taro's photographs ever published.”
http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.2876511/k.1E74/Gerda_Taro.htm
