The Brooklyn Rail

We hardly remember the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939 and flooded those years with news about the precariousness of democracy and the cruel efficacy of fascism—news that lost its urgency the moment Nazi Germany invaded Poland and made the Second World War inevitable. If Spanish democracy’s struggle and ultimate defeat are dim memories, it is no surprise that we have forgotten the funeral of Gerda Taro, a photographer who recorded the energy and optimism of the Republican militias that fought the Nationalist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his reactionary allies.

War is chaotic and accidents are common. Taro died in July 1937 when a Republican tank under bombardment sideswiped the car that was carrying her to safety. She had been taking photos at the front in Brunete, a town on the outskirts of Madrid, and decided to leave only when she ran out of film. As she rode on the car’s running board, the collision threw her to the ground and the tank’s treads crushed her. Taro was just short of her twenty-seventh birthday. Louis Aragon, a Surrealist poet and the director of the communist journal Ce Soir, arranged for her body to be transported to Paris. Taro’s photographs had appeared in Ce Soir and so many other publications that she had become a symbol of democratic resistance. Tens of thousands of Parisians followed the funeral procession that carried her coffin to Père Lachaise cemetery.

The Capa Space, an exhibition venue in Yorktown, New York, is currently showing a selection of Taro’s photographs. Some are grim. Two Republican soldiers carry a third, wounded soldier on a stretcher. A dense crowd waits at the entrance to the morgue in Valencia, hoping for a chance to enter and of course hoping not to find family members and friends there. Yet many of Taro’s images show that she found reasons for hope amid war, preparations for war, and the political disaster that drove the Republicans to take up arms. From their antifascism followed the egalitarianism that welcomed women into the ranks of their militias. One of Taro’s happiest images shows three militiawomen in lively conversation; among her most striking is a picture of a young woman in silhouette, elegantly posed on one knee and aiming a pistol. In her photographs of militiamen marching across their training grounds, they display discipline untouched by fanaticism. Taro’s unspoken message is that the Republican forces are orderly and formidable, not the ragtag assemblage of leftwing opportunists that fascist propaganda made them out to be. At the fronts she visited, Taro recorded burning trucks, buildings battered into rubble, and soldiers at the barricades exchanging rifle fire with the enemy. There are portraits of officers consulting in the field, of politicians addressing crowds, and of solitary war orphans in makeshift orphanages. Taro was an unflinching reporter.

The Capa Space is named after Robert Capa, the war photographer who died in 1954 while covering the Vietnamese war against French colonial forces. Born in Budapest, in 1913, to Jewish parents, he was accused of communist sympathies during his teenage years. Escaping to Berlin, he became a staff photographer for a German news agency. The rise of Hitler drove him to Paris, where he met Gerta Pohorylle—later known as Gerda Taro—a German-Jewish photographer who had also fled the Nazi regime. They became lovers, staying afloat in Depression-era Paris by placing their work through Alliance Photo, an agency run by a colleague Capa had known in Berlin.

The Civil War began in July 1936, when rightwing factions in the Spanish army attempted a coup against the Republic. Though it failed, government forces could not regain control over the entire country. By August, Capa and Taro had arrived in Barcelona, a Republican stronghold. All was calm, so they traveled on to Zaragoza and Madrid, finding their way to a war zone only when they approached Córdoba and met refugees driven from the city by the Nationalist occupation. For nearly a year, they traveled from one front to the next, photographing military clashes and their aftermath. Sometimes they worked side by side, sometimes independently. Journals throughout Europe published their pictures, and in May 1937 one of Taro’s photographs appeared on the cover of the French magazine Regards. When she died two months later, Capa was devastated.

According to Marie T. Keller, who contributed an illuminating essay to the publication accompanying the Taro exhibition at the Capa Space, Capa felt sympathy for the Republicans and despised the Nationalists led by Franco. He had, after all, encountered fascism in Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, he tried to maintain a degree of professional objectivity. Unabashedly passionate about the Republican cause, Taro meant her photography to serve as a weapon in the struggle to win a decent future for the people of Spain. Perishing in that struggle, she never knew that the hoped-for future would not arrive until Franco’s death in 1975.