Gerda Taro, opening today through January 6, 2008, at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas (at 43rd Street), New York, NY, +1.212.857,0000, www.icp.org.
By Stephen Wolgast
NEW YORK, NY - When the photographer Gerda Taro became the first female journalist killed in battle in 1937, she was hailed as a modern Joan of Arc. French girls formed societies in her memory. Newspapers in Paris stretched out their coverage of her death and funeral over two weeks. And in Philadelphia, a bubble-gum company included her in a 240-card series devoted to “True Stories of Modern Warfare.”
No one would expect such a reaction to a war correspondent’s death today, let alone a war photographer’s. But the times, the wars and the causes were different.
Taro covered the Spanish Civil War for Vu magazine and the newspaper Ce Soir, both in Paris. When the war started, in 1936, the West saw it as the best place to fight fascism before it spread across Europe. Partisans on both sides joined the struggle, including intellectuals such as Ernest Hemmingway, whose work was influenced by his experiences aiding the anti-fascist Loyalists.
At the time, Taro was an assistant to Robert Capa, whose work in the war would give him international renown. At first she typed his captions and helped organize his negatives. But her wit, energy and intelligence – not to mention her beauty – Capa noticed. They became lovers; he helped her learn how to take news pictures.
The two of them left Paris for Spain to work as partners, publishing their work jointly under the name Capa/Taro. Her work quickly proved to be original and insightful. By April 1937 her photos were published with her own byline.
By the time you get to this point in the exhibit of her work that opens today (September 26) at the International Center of Photography in New York, you’re astonished to realize that her photographic career is already half over.
In the few months left in her life, Taro’s work changes as dramatically as her surroundings. Arriving in Spain in the autumn of 1936, she spent time with volunteer troops training for battle. Men and women from the countryside line up for marches, practice firing rifles and relax playfully. In these photographs, made on a Rolleiflex’s square negative, Taro fills the frame with formal composition and figures as strong and upright and crisp as the Soviet art that was then approved by Moscow. (As Life magazine pointed out after her death, Ce Soir backed the Communist Party, and “Gerda Taro was frankly a propagandist for the Loyalists, taking pictures only behind government lines.” In the U.S. today that might be called patriotic.)
Moving out of training camps and into the field, she photographed sentries and scouting patrols. She was with Capa on September 5, 1936, when he took his most famous picture, “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Cerro Muriano, Cordoba front, Spain,” photographing alongside him. Although she doesn’t have a frame of the death, she took pictures earlier in the day of the same soldier on reconnaissance with his comrades.
It is in the field, moving away from controlled and safe situations, that her style comes into its own. Gone are the geometry of troops in rank and file and static poses. In their place are the drama and action that happen when a photographer goes into the field, adapting to her surroundings as the surroundings change.
She photographed refugees of the war, women and their children in deplorable bivouacs, and orphans trying to make the most of their altered lives. At about this time, in the first months of 1937, she switched to a Leica.
Rightist air raids in Valencia left many dead. Taro went to a morgue to record the victims. Her sympathy for the dead is clear as her style shows her development beyond formal poses. Instead of simply photographing corpses laid out on the floor or on autopsy tables, Taro succeeds in showing the victims as unfortunate people who happened to die violent deaths.
One photograph depicts a woman who could be a grandmother, left with an expression that’s nearly a smile, as if watching her grandchild. Looking at it I felt none of the creepiness that often comes with viewing the recently dead. Another picture is taken from the end of a table that holds two bodies. Both are still dressed, but one has shoes on while the other is barefoot. It’s as if they’re a couple (though it’s impossible to tell the gender of either) in a final embrace.
Soon she made it into battle, where her first photographs tend to show soldiers running ahead of her while she pursues.
In June she accompanied a group of explosives experts in Madrid. In a rare use of negative space, one group is framed by a jagged opening in a stone wall as they leave a building that is mostly dark. Another frame is taken alongside a group of four soldiers as they advance through a patch of deep grass; one of the men is blurred by his motion.
She made it to the front in Brunete in July, having already seen her share of destruction. Two photographs of Republican soldiers during the battle are remarkable in their depiction of urgency. Both show two soldiers in a doorway, either pushing a door open or holding it closed. In each image, both soldiers are in similar, kinetic poses, pressing with all their might into the door. Their movement is the sharpest contrast to her earlier pictures.
In Richard Whelan’s book, “Robert Capa: A Biography” (University of Nebraska Press, 1985), she acknowledges to a friend while they were in Brunete the unlikelihood that they were still alive. "When you think of all the fine people we both know who have been killed even in one offensive, you get an absurd feeling that somehow it's unfair still to be alive."
Taro was killed at the end of July as she was leaving the battlefield. A Loyalist tank smashed into the car she was riding in (or on – she had hopped on the running boards). She died in a hospital the next morning. Her funeral was held on August 1, 1937, which would have been her 27th birthday.
Whelan, who died in May 2007, was one of the organizers of the current Taro exhibit at ICP. In "Robert Capa: A Biography," he wrote an excellent account of Taro's final day:
The morning of Sunday, July 25, (1937) Taro, who was planning to leave for Paris the following day and wanted one last chance to get some spectacular action shots, set out for Brunete with (Federated Press reporter) Ted Allan. But by the time they reached (a Loyalist general’s) headquarters, it was almost one in the afternoon. Despite Gerda’s insistence that she simply had to photograph the action that day, the general ordered them to leave the area immediately. In five minutes, he warned them, all hell would break loose.
Allan was ready to obey, but Gerda had no intention of doing so, and she persuaded him to go with her to some shallow dugouts on a hill nearby. Soon the Insurgent artillery started up, and Insurgent planes began to attack; some of the hundreds of bombs they dropped on the Loyalist lines during the next hour fell uncomfortably close to their dugout. Gerda took pictures all the while. Then came strafers, and still she photographed.
Under the continuing heavy barrage of bombs, artillery shells, and strafing, the Loyalist troops in and around Brunete panicked, broke ranks, and began to flee -- a fatal mistake, for once they were out in the open, the planes could attack them all the more effectively. Near Gerda and Allan's dugout some soldiers made an attempt to help stop the retreat by threatening to shoot anyone who tried to get past them. Gerda jumped out of the dugout and started shouting at the retreating men, exhorting them to re-form their lines. The men, realizing that the planes had at last stopped coming over, obeyed.
At about six-thirty in the evening, having walked all the way to Villanueva de la Canada, north of Brunete, Gerda and Allan saw (the general’s) large black touring car speeding in their direction and hailed it. The general wasn't in his car; instead, there were three wounded men in the back seat. Gerda tossed her cameras onto the front seat and she and Allan jumped -- in the best tradition of American gangster movies -- onto one of the running boards. She was certain that she had gotten the best photographs of her life that day, and she wanted to celebrate with a bottle of Champagne when they got back to Madrid. Then she would leave for Paris in the morning.
Suddenly a Loyalist tank that was careering wildly out of control bore down on them. The car's driver swerved to avoid it, but it was too late. The tank sideswiped the car, mangling Gerda and Allan. Eventually they were taken to the American field hosp at El Escorial, where the doctors operated on Gerda during the night. They thought she would make it, although she was suffering badly from shock and would probably limp for the rest of her life if she survived. It was about six o'clock on the morning of Monday, July 26, when she died.
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The funeral procession from the Maison de la Culture (in Paris), where the body had lain for two days, to the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery began at ten-thirty on the morning of Sunday, August 1, which would have been Gerda's twenty-seventh birthday. Despite the bitter absurdity of her having been killed by a Loyalist tank in what was essentially a horrible traffic accident on the periphery of the battle, the Communist Party had declared her an anti-fascist martyr and had organized a spectacular procession, with flowers, music, banners and thousands of mourners. Louis Aragon, the editor-in-chief of Ce Soir, later wrote that Capa, "by my side, cried, and, when the cortege halted, hid his eyes on my shoulder."
In death Gerda found the fame she had craved in life. She was hailed as a heroine, a latter-day Joan of Arc. Tributes poured into Ce Soir, and the paper printed them all. The editors, who for more than two weeks dragged out the coverage of the last days of Gerda's life and her funeral, made limitless claims of her heroism and for the thoroughness of her coverage of the civil war, even going so far as to claim that she had recently spent much time on the Bilbao front (she hadn't been there at all) and publishing a photograph that Capa had made in December as one of Gerda's last photos of Madrid.
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According to Ce Soir (May 30, 1938, page 8), Gerda's monument -- a horizontal block topped by an Egyptian-style marble bird and bowl and a double cube bearing her name, date, and a brief text about her death -- was sculpted by Alberto Giacometti. Her grave was located near the Mur des Federes, the memorial to the Communards. The lease for the plot expired several years ago; since it was not renewed, Gerda's monument was removed and apparently destroyed.
Gerda Taro, currently at the International Center of Photography in New York, NY.
