Javier Otazu
New York, Nov 4 (EFE) .- Few photographers have achieved the fame of the legendary Robert Capa, the founding father of war photojournalism, but there have been too many misunderstandings about him and his work that will be dispelled with the exhibition “Death in the making “presented in New York by the International Center of Photography (ICP) until January 9th.
The exhibition bears the title of the work that Capa published as early as 1938 with images of the first year of the Spanish Civil War: a book (with the famous “Death of a militiaman” as a cover) then edited without too much care, with numerous errors in the attribution of the photos or in the identification of the places and that now the curator Cyinthia Young has taken care of repairing in a new edition appeared in 2020.
The exhibition at the ICP is nothing more than an extension of this new edition of the book, which has tried to be as faithful as possible to the original, avoiding the temptation – recognizes Young in an interview with EFE – to insert other iconic images. of Capa’s long career, although it dates back to other periods of the same Spanish war.
THREE NAMES AND THREE PSEUDONYMS
If there is one person overshadowed by Capa’s fame, it is Gerda Taro, his lover and colleague, with whom he traveled from Paris to Madrid in 1936 to tread the mud of the front, always on the side of the Republicans.
Here begins the first misunderstanding: neither she nor he were called that: they were both Jews – Gerda born in Germany, Robert in Hungary – and they decided to change their names with others that did not denote their origins in that march of anti-Semitism in Europe. , and that sounded more “international”.
Her biographers claim, and Young confirms it, that Taro, from a wealthy family, taught Capa to move in society – to dress and speak appropriately – while teaching her the art of photography, in which he would soon put in light. A third photographer moved with them, also Jewish and also with a pseudonym, Chim.
Here is the second mistake, the most unfair: the photographs of Taro and Chim arrived in European – and then American – newspapers and magazines sent by Capa, and perhaps for this reason they all went down in history as works of Capa, even if – specifies Young – no one can prove that Robert tried to steal the images of his friends.
The proof: when the photographer published that book in 1938, he dedicated it “to Gerda Taro, who spent a year on the Spanish front, and stayed there”. An elegant ellipsis not to mention the fact that Gerda was accidentally crushed by a “friendly” tank on the outskirts of Brunete, where in July 1937 one of the bloodiest battles of the war took place. I was 26 years old.
THE MEXICAN SUITCASE
The curator was able to trace the authorship of almost all the photos of that baptism of fire that marked the passage of Capa to posterity, thanks, among other things, to a suitcase that appeared in Mexico in 2007 and which contained thousands of negatives of the same Capa, by Taro and Chim.
Now, in the new book and New York exhibition, Young has established with certainty that of all the photos in that book, 111 are attributable to Capa, 24 to Taro, and 13 to Chim.
Young feels he has done justice to Taro: “She’s not just Capa’s girlfriend anymore, even if she hasn’t made history.” Young argues that the attribution of the photos to Capa had a lot to do not so much with Capa’s intentions but with the machismo of an era, when it was convenient to introduce the hero to his willing lover. As for Chim’s “cancellation”, he attributes it to errors or laziness on the part of the Magnum agency.
MILITIANS, PRIESTS AND CIBELES
The images of the trio of photojournalists paint a rather familiar panorama – thanks above all to them – of that Spain that tried to form an army almost from nothing: you see the training of recruits in Valencia, the blessing of a priest in a Basque battalion or militiaman with the image of a saint among the ruins of a bombed church.
The statue of Cibeles appears as a parapet of sandbags rises around it, women and children gazing in anguish at the Madrid sky as planes pass and militiamen board the train. Once in combat, some are portrayed wounded on a stretcher, others playing accordions in a moment of leisure.
“It’s not a good picture book today,” Young warns. For Capa, who didn’t even know English when the book was published, it was “a propaganda tool”, an educational tool designed to tell the American public “a pure cause”. EFE
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