When I saw the first few photos in Gerda Taro’s exhibit at the International Center of Photography in New York (now showing through January 6, 2008), I was especially taken by one that is rather famous. It shows a woman in training to fight for the Republican forces in The Spanish Civil War.
Fought in the years between 1936 and 1939, this was a conflict won by the right-wing insurgent forces of General Francisco Franco, the loser being the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic. It was the one war that the fascists won, and General Franco was able to weather World War II, in which his cohorts Mussolini and Hitler met their fates at such considerable cost to the rest of the world. The fascist dictator Franco ruled Spain until his death in 1975.
The Spanish Civil War was one of the saddest of all — a notable disaster for every single Spaniard — although it was a small war by comparison to what was to come. When you read about it in books like The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, or the extraordinary Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, you learn of the amazing heartlessness of and the terrible atrocities committed by all the forces involved. The murder that the Spanish visited on each other was extremely cold-blooded, in which even members of individual families were sometimes at chilling odds with each other.
Republican militiawoman training on the beach, outside Barcelona, August 1936. Photo: Gerda Taro
Taro’s photograph shows a remarkably fashionable-looking young woman, down on one knee, wielding a handgun at some invisible enemy. She’s in profile, and there is a kind of authoritative majesty about her, machismo that is made even more effective for me by the short heels she is wearing. It is the heels and her youthful beauty that make her seem fashionable. Yet I would not care to compliment her on all that because I fear she’d turn on me with the pistol and fire away at my attempt at charm.
This woman is a real soldier.
There are a few photos around this one that show other women preparing for war, not as nurses or backline providers of food and supplies, but as active frontline fighters. It is one of Taro’s notable strengths as a war photographer that she does not forget how women can fight side by side with the men, and will do so especially when the stakes appear to them irretrievable.
Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, Paris, 1936. Photo: Fred Stein
For the Republican forces in Spain, the fascist enemy was one that threatened to deliver the world to totalitarianism. They viewed themselves as the last defense against such a thing, and that they lost the war meant the rest of the world ultimately would have to defend itself. For many non-Spaniards, it was also a very partisan thing, and Gerda Taro was one of those. Not a champion of the balanced view, she was an ardent supporter of the Republican forces, and her photos show that.
Born in 1910 in Stuttgart, Germany, Taro’s given name was Gerda Pohorylle. At the age of 24 she went to Paris where she met and fell in love with a Hungarian photographer named Endre ErnГ¶ Friedmann. Both were Jewish and held clear-eyed views of German anti-semitism and the destruction it could ultimately bring to the Jewish people. The two changed their names: he to Robert Capa and she to Gerda Taro, and their collaboration with each other was to establish new standards of bravery and artfulness for war photographers everywhere.
Photo: Robert Capa
In 1936 the two went to Spain to cover the civil war there. Capa of course became very famous, particularly for his photo of a Republican soldier at the very moment of his being shot to death.
It is an iconically famous picture, one of many that Capa was to take over the years until his death covering the French-Vietnamese war in 1954. Taro’s career was, sadly, much shorter.
Known by the Spanish as “la pequeГ±a rubia” (the little blonde”), she was a consummately brave woman, photographing very often under extremely heavy fire. Only in her mid-twenties, she seemed impervious to the terrible conditions under which she was working.
Gerda Taro and soldier, CГіrdoba front, 1936. Photo: Robert Capa
Her photos show the effects of war unblinkingly, so much so that it is difficult to view many of them because they are so horrific. Yet there is a real depth of artfulness in the compositions she made and the way her subjects were presented. I think it is not an exaggeration to say her work somehow had Goya in mind and his pictures of war and the peasant class at work. Many would say she was simply a war photographer, but like Capa, Taro was an artist whose canvas depicts the worst that humans are capable of. That her photos are so often so beautiful makes the horror she presents even more terrifying. She’s even capable of humor, sometimes showing people trying to make the best of what they’ve been given in this awful war.
Boy wearing cap of FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), Barcelona, August 1936. Photo: Gerda Taro
Taro died on July 27, 1937 while attempting to jump onto the running board of a car when it was struck by a tank. Pablo Neruda attended her funeral in Paris (held on her 27th birthday), as did the French writer Louis Aragon. She was viewed by the French and Spanish left wing as a martyr to the war and, indeed, Gerda Taro is the first woman photographer ever to have died while covering a war. Thousands attended her funeral. Even her posthumous fame was short-lived, though, swept aside by World War II and the continuing ascendancy of Robert Capa as the emblematic war photographer.
The exhibition at ICP rights that wrong. It is the first such showing of so much of Taro’s work, and constitutes a reconstruction of her reputation as one of the finest war photographers in history.
From: feeds.blogcritics.org
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