When you talk about the war photography, quickly comes an irreplaceable binomial. The history of this type of snapshot would not be the same were it not for Gerda Taro and Andre Friedmann. In this article we will discover the importance that both characters had when photographing the most relevant events of the 20th century. Furthermore, it is important to see that Gerda Taro was also Robert Capa, since, as will be seen later, it was a pseudonym created by both her and André Friedmann to protect themselves. However, after Taro’s death, André will continue with his pseudonym alone.
War photography and its origins
Although the annals of photography go back to the 19th century and the famous Deguerreotype, photographic cameras understood as a market product, aimed at a generic public, emerged at the beginning of the 20th century.
It is then, at the dawn of the century that precedes us, when the Eastman Kodak Company The massive sale of photographic cameras begins, simple and cheap enough to make them accessible to all types of public. As historian Philipp Blom (2010: 459) explains, this wave of simple, portable cameras changed the rules of the game.
The democratization of photography he assumed that anyone could be a photographer, without the need for a photographic studio or prior preparation. Blom vividly conveys the feeling that produced such a media revolution:
“… the press photographs gave immediacy to a reality so remote, that they could also have been fairy tales. The photos made the world a smaller, faster place while preserving the charm of the era as moments in suspense and in full light.”
In this article we are not going to deal with all those anonymous people who almost privately photographed key events of their lives, but we will direct the objective of this article to shed light, as if it were a flash, on the so-called War Photography . But what is war photography?
war photography
When talking about war photography, what is referred to is the representation of war situations and how this affects the population and the territory. The ruins after a bombardment, portraits of the population or captures in full combat are a sample of what war photography entails. The emergence of this style is as early as that of photography itself. Consequently, the first bars of it are found in 19th century wars such as the S2nd Anglo-Sikh War (1848-1849) or Crimean War (1853-1856). War photography during the American Civil War (1861-1865) was also going to be very important.
As is obvious, war photography has an intrinsic relationship with the photographer who takes it. Thus, proper names are inevitable throughout this photographic style. Many authors have earned a place in the collective imagination in their own right thanks to the portrait of iconic images that have shaped the memory and places of memory of the different nations. Some forged authentic legends around his figure and inevitably died on the battlefield carrying a camera as their only weapon.
Now, when we talk about war photography, the first thing that comes to mind are conflicts typical of the 20th century. It is true that it was in that century when war photography began to be made as it is known today. However, as explained above, it is not a novelty of that century, but rather its origin is from the 19th century.
In this sense, the first proper names are already beginning to appear. Perhaps its origin is in John MacCosh (Hodgson, 1974), a British surgeon during the aforementioned Second Anglo-Sikh War. The author was not a photographer, like practically none of the figures of the 19th century who dedicated themselves to portraying battlefields. Still, the portraits of him during this period are an obvious starting signal for what was to come in the decades that followed.
The first professional photographer will be Robert Fenton, who had an authentic horse-drawn photographic caravan. Thus, he carried during his trip to Crimea, a camera of a cyclopean size that served to portray the port of Balaclava or the fearsome Valley of Death. During this time Due to the technical limitations of photography itself, images used to be profoundly static.. Prioritizing portraits, battlefield scenes and landscapes (Hodgson, 1974).
Explicit photographs of corpses already existed, something that will increase in the Opium Wars. There, photographs of battlefields flooded by corpses of both sides will be reflected.
In the Civil War of the United States we will find another level of explicit violence. Hundreds of deaths, murders and summary executions will be shown by the archaic photographic lenses of the time. This includes the conspirators who killed the president of the unionist army: Abraham Lincoln.
From this moment on, photography is going to become something inescapable in the historical process that the war entails. Crucial battles in political history will be constantly portrayed, including some like the Battle of Sedan or the Paris Commune. The War of Cuba was also portrayed, being one of the first in which a use is made of propaganda of the horror of war to reflect the cruelty of the enemy.
This is deeply interesting because as the photographic style matures, intentionality advances. At first, also linked to the photographic technique itself, the images simply tried to reflect what was seen. However, from this moment the situation is slowly changing towards a clearer intentionality. As photography gains importance, the political also enters photography with greater relevance.
In this sense, the 20th century is entered with an overwhelming triumph of war photography. Images from the First World War (1914-1918) are overwhelming proof of this. As has been explained, throughout this century that precedes us, the technical progress of cameras allows the situation to become more conducive to taking images prone to immediacy. For this reason, the War photography evolves giving rise to pieces that not only serve as an inescapable historical source, but also as something artistic that reflects something beyond photography itself.
In this, there were two figures that acted as practically one and that had a fundamental importance in the period between the wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and even the Indochina War. Thus, today the protagonists of this article are Gerda Taro and Robert Capatwo fundamental figures for understanding the world of the mid-twentieth century and two true legends of war photography.
Gerda Taro
Gerda Taro was not Robert Capa’s companion. She was half of Robert Capa. Taro has seen his fame overshadowed by the pseudonym he created together with his boyfriend, Endre Frieddman.
Said name, created to protect the identity of both, tends to grant fame only to him, either because of his long journey, or because of her premature and tragic death. Hidden and often forgotten under the pseudonym she created together with Endre, not even her family could claim her role as a photographer, as they suffered the worst of luck when they were found by Nazism in Serbia (Campelo, Tenoira, M. 2013: 40)
Before entering into the study of her figure and her biography, it is worth noting, and if I may say so, underlining, the fact that Gerda Taro is considered the first female photojournalist to cover a war front, and die in it.
Who is Gerda Taro?
Gerda Pohorylle was born in the German city of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1910. Coming from a Polish Jewish family, she soon began to show sympathy for socialism and the workers’ struggle. In 1929, adding 19 years, she settled in the city of Liepzig because her family was going through certain economic difficulties (Campelo, Tenoira. 2013: 42).
Considering her ideology and background, it is not surprising that our protagonist left her native country when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 (ICP.org). It has transpired that she, in that same year, suffered a run-in with the Nazis for which she was arrested. This seems to be the trigger for her departure from her country and her subsequent name change to Gerda Taro().
The destination chosen by our protagonist will be Paris, in the French capital, Gerda meets great figures of politics and French entertainment, including the photographer Fred Stein. East famous German photographer achieved recognition for his Pictures of Albert Einstein or Hannah Arendt. It is from the contact with Stein when Taro begins to discover the mysteries of the revealed, and when he begins to work in the agency Alliance Photo (Campelo, Tenoira, M. 2013: 44). However, the beginning of her career as a photographer will come a year later, when our protagonist meets André Ernö Friedmann, another emerging photographer on the parisian scene. Due to her new status as a photojournalist, Taro gets a French residence card.
It is said that due to the ambition of both and the love that united them, they decide to create the pseudonym of Robert Capeemerging as a commercial strategy to enter the US market (Ruiz Franco: 2008: 289).
It is precisely this almost romantic ambition that leads the couple to travel to Spain at the beginning of the Civil War (1936-1939), where both tried to immortalize the national scene.
Once in Barcelona, and under a contract for Vu Magazine (ICP.org), they both began to cover the clashes on the side of the Popular Army, since both felt very committed to the republican cause.
Robert Cape
The fame of the pseudonym “Capa” came precisely from this incursion into the Spanish Civil War; Well, by 1937, not only had the Capa brand acquired a certain reputation, but Taro herself had emerged as a recognized photojournalist (ICP.org).
In the first moments of the war, Taro dedicates himself to photographing the revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona, focusing on female militiamen. Taro’s interest in portraying women in different war situations reflects the photographer’s interest in exporting women as symbols of the armed struggle, in this case, against fascism.
For a woman as ideologically committed as Taro was, ideology was a fundamental part of her work. Her vocation for war photography was shared by other women who, attracted by the conflict, also came to Spain to cover the progress of the war; their names were: Tina Madotti and Kati Horna (Ruíz Franco: 2008: 292-293)
The journey that the couple describes through the Spanish geography begins, as we have…