Photography Collection

Gerda Taro, Republican militiawomen training on the beach, outside Barcelona, August 1936 © International Center of Photography.

The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, jointly with the International Center of Photography, New York (ICP), presents the first retrospective exhibition of the work of Gerda Taro, a pioneer of war photojournalism. The exhibition brings together a hundred photographs and an assortment of documentary material that shows Gerda Taro’s sensitivity, capturing the human face of the war, both behind the lines and on the battlefield and in the trenches, next to the soldiers.
This exhibition places Taro’s work in its context and highlights the figure of a photographer who has remained in the shadow of the man who was her lover and professional collaborator, Robert Capa. Together they travelled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, where Taro lost her life after gaining enormous international professional prestige. Proof of this prestige is the fact that her photographs of this war illustrated the reports of the most outstanding publications, such as Vu, Regards, Voilà or Match. The show presents images of all the episodes and scenes in the Civil War photographed by Gerda Taro, from her arrival with Capa in Barcelona on August 5th 1936, just a few weeks after the war broke out. In Madrid, Taro immediately joined the international community of artistes and intellectuals supporting the Republic, among whom were Rafael Albertí, María Teresa León, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos or Martha Gellhorn. With the sensitivity that characterizes her work, Taro captured the atmosphere in the cities she visited and the everyday nature of the war: the training of the militiamen, daily life at the front, the victims of the bombing etc. She witnessed and photographed some of the main episodes, like the struggle on the Aragon front or that of Córdoba (the scene of Capa’s famous photo Death of a Militiaman), the resistance in Madrid, the republican offensive in Segovia (that her friend Hemingway immortalised later in For Whom the Bell Tolls) or the battle for Brunete, where she was killed. Her photographs reflect the grief on the faces of the inhabitants of the cities destroyed by the bombing raids, the desperation of the refugees who have been attacked on their retreat or the horror experienced by soldiers and civilians.

Gerda Taro, Boy wearing cap of the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), Barcelona, August 1936 © International Center of Photography

Born in Stuttgart, Gerda Taro’s real name was Gerda Pohorylle. In 1934, she and her partner Endre Ernö Friedmann invented the fictitious figure of an American reporter, Robert Capa, under whose name they could sell photographs at a price three times the usual one. She became Gerda Taro, the American photographer’s secretary, while Endre passed himself off as the reporter’s darkroom assistant. They thus created a brand under which they would sell photographs taken at times by him or by both of them. Once the ruse was discovered, he took the name Robert Capa and she kept that of Gerda Taro. The close personal and professional relationship between the little blond girl, as everyone on the Spanish front knew her, and Robert Capa made it enormously difficult to establish the authorship of many of the photographs taken by Taro, as some were attributed to Capa and others were stamped “REPORTAGE CAPA & TARO”. Only in 1937, months before she died, did she sign the photographs published in the prestigious French newspaper Ce Soir with the independent signature PHOTO TARO. Years of work by Richard Whelan and Irme Schaber have made it possible to at last exhibit Taro’s work free of the shadow of Capa in this retrospective. Gerda Taro was a pioneer of war photography, and the first graphic reporter to be killed at the front. She died at El Escorial on July 26th 1937, after being crushed by a tank at the battle for Brunete, on her way back from the front. On the day she was buried in Paris, with all honours, she would have been 27 years old. Despite the fact that Taro was acclaimed as an anti-fascist martyr, the importance and singular nature of her work fell into oblivion after the Second World War, and Taro began to be remembered as Robert Capa’s lover rather than the exceptional, committed photographer she had been. It was not until the 1980s, once the anti-communist hysteria that characterised the Cold War years had died down, that it was possible to vindicate her outstanding role in the history of photography.
Starting with the Second World War, many photographers followed in Taro’s footsteps as graphic war reporters. The role of women photojournalists began to be consolidated in the Second World War and after Taro other great figures emerged, like Lee Miller (Poughkeepsie [New York], 1907 – Chiddingly [East Sussex], 1977), who had learnt the trade next to Man Ray and had taken an active part in the Surrealist movement. Miller left the world of fashion behind to cover the Second World War. Margaret Bourke-White (New York, 1904 – Connecticut, 1971) also photographed this same war, this time from the Russian front.

Gerda Taro
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya
- September 27th 2009
Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.;
Sundays and public holidays, 10 a.m. to 2.30 p.m.;
Mondays not public holidays, closed.

Palau Nacional, Parc de Montjuïc
Barcelona, Spain