Capa's Once-Missing "Mexican Suitcase" Negatives Have Been Scanned

 

NEW YORK, NY (April 29, 2009) – The mysterious "Mexican suitcase" of more than 4,000 of Robert Capa's missing negatives from the Spanish Civil War that surfaced decades later in three boxes in Mexico City have now been digitally scanned and will be shown next year, according to a story just published in The New York Times.

Most of the 126 rolls of film were shot during the Spanish Civil War, and during the scanning many previously unknown Capa photographs were discovered, the Times says. Not all of the photographs in the suitcase were by Capa, however. Included in the treasure trove are negatives taken by Gerda Taro and a "wealth of new work" by David "Chim" Seymour, one of Magnum Photos' founders.

It's thought that the film was boxed up in Paris in 1939. When Capa fled Europe for America he assumed the negatives were lost when the Nazis invaded Paris. Capa continued to believe that up until he died in May 25, 1954, when he stepped on a land mine in Vietnam while covering the war. But in fact the negatives traveled to Marseille and then to Mexico, where in 2008 negotiations with descendants of a Mexican general who served under Pancho Villa landed the negatives into the hands of the International Center of Photography in Manhattan (which was founded by Capa's brother, photographer Cornell Capa).

Today's story in the Times by Randy Kennedy says that ICP, which has possession of the three photographers' film, plans an exhibition of Chim's photographs in September 2010, and also a separate show of Capa and Taro's work next year.

Some of the images from the Mexican suitcase are online here on ICP's Web site, and thethe Times story is online here.

 

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