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The resurrection of Gerda Taro

Surely the last thing I thought was Gerda Taro in the resurrection of the flesh. But what will happen to them on Wednesday is the closest thing to a secular resurrection. The International Center of Photography in New York will open an exhibition of his photographs of the Spanish Civil War, the earliest that no woman ever took on a battlefield. The world knew most of them veiled by an illustrious name wrong: that of Robert Capa.

Gerda Taro was born in 1910 in the German city of Stuttgart. It was not the best time to be born there, being Polish and Jewish family. Then everyone still called her by name as did his birth, Gerda Pohorylle. In 1933 she was arrested by protests and activities against the Nazis, something that at the time and then took her in a straight line toward communism. But this did not saw him up close, for now, because as soon as he could, emigrated to Paris.

Lovers and partners

There he met another Jew her as the East, a Hungarian who was named Andre Friedmann, and was a photographer. He and Gerda were lovers first, and then partners. They began to take pictures together and sell them together, so that together all signed with the same name: that of Robert Capa. It was assumed that Robert Capa was an American photojournalist. It was actually the pseudonym that was Andre Friedmann to break away from the peloton dark Slav who swarm through Paris, and adorn their work with a commercial incentive. Those were the days of the cosmopolitan Parisian bohemia, with the real American photographer Man Ray chasing Kiki of Montparnasse, before getting to know Lee Miller.

While his companion was renamed Robert Capa, Gerda Pohorylle was renamed Gerda Taro. We chose to honor a Japanese artist who was then also in Paris and fashionable, Taro Okamoto. They also had in mind for the actress Greta Garbo, as Andre Friedmann thought, it seems, in the American film director Frank Capra.

Thus, sharing bed, camera and macaroni, were Robert Capa and Gerda Taro to Barcelona in July 1936, just up the Spanish Civil War. He was returned to Paris twice, but the second, and she remained in Spain, where he would find death the summer of 1937, in Brunete. Embistió a tank car in which it was mounted, when he withdrew with the Republicans. He died the next day. He was buried in Paris on August 1, the day that would have served 27 years. The poets Pablo Neruda and Louis Aragon attended his funeral. Alberto Giacometti sculpted his grave. He was honored as a martyr who had died antifascist wonderfully young, in the prime of action and ideals.

Over time, however, its abrupt end and its consolidation as heroin communist turned against him. His work began confused with that of his partner and ended up lost in it. Robert Capa achieved worldwide fame and she fell into an oblivion of the rescues that now the International Center of Photography in New York.

Aside from the burden mythical still retains his job as the first photojournalism war is the work of a woman, the role of Gerda Taro is considered crucial to understanding what it is and how it constructs the visual imagination of a war. Even more so than Robert Capa, his photos were searched and inns. Deliberately ideological. Propaganda. Not intended to portray both, or not only, what they see as what they want to see. What we see in expecting a war to which party is going to clearly taken.

Thus, Gerda Taro photographed Republican militiamen trained on the beaches of Barcelona and immortalized simple and popular icons of resistance in Valencia and Cordoba. After a brief stay in Madrid, went to Brunete to "prove" that the Republican side persisted in his defense, although the Franco ensured the opposite side. Significantly, died during the withdrawal. For the first time may see their photos dispassionately: without overloading of heroism or stigmatization. And without the shadow of Robert Capa.

Via ABC.es

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