A snapshot of love and death

Spain, September 1936. On the Andalusian front at Cerro Muriano, on the outskirts of Córdoba, the Civil War is raging. A militiaman of the Second Republic falls backwards, struck by a Falangist bullet. His rifle slips from his grasp. His chest arches out towards the void. His body is already a dark shadow stretched out on the ground. His arms are outstretched like Christ on the cross.

It is he – long identified as the 24-year-old anarchist Federico Borrell García – who has become the iconic image of the Spanish Civil War. The image has remained etched in the collective memory because, alongside the Republican troops on the front line, there were also those who were capturing the fighting on film. They called him Robert Capa. He had managed to capture the soldier through his lens just as he was falling. Who knows? Perhaps he chose to frame him because of his white shirt and black cartridge belts slung across his chest against the barren backdrop of the Sierra Morena. Or perhaps, as Capa himself recounted many years later during a radio interview, the photograph was simply the result of perfect timing. Chance and coincidence. Because Capa captured the fatal moment of death with millimetre precision, raising his camera above his head, ‘without looking through the viewfinder, as the Republican soldiers were emerging from the trench and being mowed down one after the other by enemy fire’.

In any case, no one before Capa had ever documented with such visual power the sacrifice of an ordinary young man, a campesino wearing rope-soled shoes, at a time when espadrilles were not yet in fashion. No one had managed, through the international press, to transform the report of a battle into a manifesto on the horror of the fratricidal conflict that had broken out in Spain two months earlier.

Capa, too, was young, barely in his twenties. Before taking his most famous photograph, "The Falling Soldier", he was a mystery. Afterwards, he became a legend. And he pioneered a genre: photojournalism. The live account of the moment of truth. Or, perhaps, the truth of the moment. Which, at times, does not match the reality of the events as they actually unfolded.

Here lies the paradox of Capa. And of his double. For it is not merely the ambiguity of the pseudonym, behind which, as we know, lay a couple – partners in life and in work. Their names were Endre Erno Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew born in Budapest in 1913, and Gerta Pohorylle, whose stage name was Gerda Taro, also Jewish, a German citizen of Polish origin, born in Stuttgart in 1910. They met in Paris in 1934 while exiled from the advancing threat of Nazism. They seemed made for one another. They were both young, cultured and penniless, both passionate about photography, which at the time was a key medium for depicting reality and the Manichean modernity of black and white. It was he who introduced Gerda to the trade. It was she – as photography historians note – who came up with the winning idea to secure more commissions and sell the photos at a higher price. Together they invented the persona of Robert Capa, a wealthy American photographer based in Paris, so well-established that he could afford a couple of assistants in Europe. It was the two of them, as a pair, who represented him on every front, in every situation, and in every negotiation with illustrated magazines.

The photograph of the militiaman who was fatally shot was first published in France in the magazine Vu on 23 September 1936, then, a month later, in Regards, a news magazine dedicated to photojournalism. But it was only when it appeared in the legendary American magazine Life in July 1937 that the image reached a global audience. The title itself is a summary of the caption provided by Life for the full-page photograph: ‘Robert Capa’s camera captures a Spanish soldier at the very moment he is killed by a bullet to the head on the Cordoba front’.

In the 1930s, photography was still perceived as a direct testimony to reality, almost as irrefutable proof of what had happened. Of course, one could discuss perspective, point of view, the photographic composition and the photographer’s choices. But the reliability of photojournalism was not called into question. Unlike written reports, which were often accused of being propaganda. In the specific case of the Militiaman shot dead, the photograph immediately became an icon: the universal symbol of the struggle against totalitarianism, of the anguish of a Europe that recognised itself in a Spain split in two by the military coup.

Then, in the 1970s, doubts began to surface. The militiaman’s pose was too artificial and perfect. Too ‘theatrical’. Accounts emerged from war correspondents present in Spain suggesting that the iconic photograph ‘The Falling Soldier’ had been staged during a lull in the fighting on the Andalusian front. The anarchist Federico Borrell García is said to have actually died on 5 September 1936 at Cerro Muriano, but behind a tree and not in the open. The arid, barren landscape forming the backdrop to the soldier’s fall does not correspond to the location indicated by Capa. It is said to be in the vicinity of Espejo, a village in the province of Córdoba, 50 kilometres away from Cerro Muriano.

In 1975, investigative journalist Phillip Knightley systematically examined what had by then become known as the Capa Affair. In his book The First Casualty – whose title echoes the maxim that truth is the ‘first casualty’ of war – he sparked a controversy over the authenticity, identity and context of The Falling Soldier. A controversy destined never to be resolved. Including the key question: who actually took the photograph?

As recently as this September, the Spanish daily El Diario has revived the theory that the photograph was taken by Gerda Tardo and not by her partner Friedmann, dedicating a lengthy article to the ‘new evidence’ provided by the Andalusian archaeologist and historian Fernando Penco. Penco maintains that the female signature on the iconic image of the war that divided the country ninety years ago can be found in the negative format and other documented details. He has been dedicated to the “Capa case” for twenty-five years, with his research gaining international recognition. His work has also been published by the British newspaper The Telegraph and reviewed by the International Centre of Photography in New York. Penco himself, however, urges caution. Attributing a photograph with certainty is a difficult task, because Friedmann and Taro were working as a pair under Capa’s name. They had set off together from Paris for Catalonia in the summer of ’36, in the aftermath of the military coup. They shared ideals and assignments. They were chasing ‘the news as it happens’, as their friend Henri Cartier-Bresson – whom they had met in Paris in the 1930s – had theorised. Above all, like many anti-fascist activists of the time – intellectuals, writers, artists, journalists and photographers who had flocked to Spain from all over – they had realised that the Civil War was much more than a regional conflict. It was the testing ground for the world war that would soon set Europe ablaze.

It seems that it was Gerda Taro who secured the press passes. Together with Endre Friedmann, they flew to Barcelona. They worked side by side, often on the same fronts. At times, they exchanged cameras and negatives. They also shared a guiding principle: “If the photo isn’t good, it’s because you aren’t close enough”. Thus was born the Capa brand, destined to become a hallmark of quality photojournalism. So much so that the American writer John Steinbeck wrote that “Capa knew what to look for and what to do with it once he’d found it. He knew that you cannot portray war, because it is, above all, an emotion. To be able to photograph that emotion, you had to know it intimately”.

And so it was that Gerda Taro died. By getting too close. By chasing the story as it unfolded. She had courage to spare. She had already demonstrated this in Nazi Germany, where she – from a middle-class family with middle-class connections – had been imprisoned for her activism in the German Communist Party. She managed to escape to Paris thanks to her Polish passport. Without money and, by then, without a homeland.

She died in Spain, in Brunete, a few kilometres west of Madrid, where in July 1937 the Republican army launched a three-week offensive in an attempt to relieve the pressure of Franco’s troops on the capital. It was a fierce battle, fought in the hellish heat of the Meseta Central, across a vast expanse of dust and stones. On 26 July 1937, Gerda, the ‘little blonde’ with her ever-present camera, was travelling, clinging to the running board of a vehicle laden with the wounded. In the chaos of the retreat, a Republican tank collided with the vehicle. Gerda fell beneath the tracks of the friendly fire. She was twenty-six years old.

Endre Erno was left with a handful of rolls of film, many negatives to develop and the grief of having lost his partner. He was also left with the name ‘Capa’. That brand, born as a brilliant invention by two young men in love and penniless, became the pseudonym that Friedmann bore until his death. Which, for him too, came as a result of a war he had seen all too closely. He was killed by a landmine in Indochina in 1954. He was forty years old.

Gerda Taro was buried in Paris on 1 August 1937, on her twenty-seventh birthday. A huge crowd, largely made up of members of the French Communist Party, accompanied her to the Père-Lachaise cemetery. The poets Pablo Neruda and Louis Aragon delivered the eulogies. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti created a monument for her grave. Then, in 1942, during the Vichy regime, the grave was vandalised by German soldiers: the epitaph was scraped away, and the ‘falcon of light’ sculpted by Giacometti was destroyed.

That scar was never healed. Indeed, it had the effect of a damnatio memoriae. Just as the Nazis had hoped. Little by little, it helped to erase Gerda Taro’s identity. She ended up in the shadows – the ultimate paradox for a photographer. Gerda was no longer recognized as the first female photojournalist to die in war. No longer the pioneer of photojournalism. Instead, she was increasingly seen merely as the partner of Robert Capa, the survivor. The man who, alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and a few others, founded the Magnum Agency in 1947, which was destined to become the most influential in the world. The man who continued to bear the name and shoulder the weight of the legend on every war front, including the Allied landings in Sicily in 1943 and those in Normandy in 1944.

In Madrid, Spain, where Gerda arrived from Brunete, clutching her stomach with both hands and worrying more about her cameras than her own life, Friedmann-Capa wept. Accounts are unanimous. To pay tribute to her tenacity, to her ability never to back down, he dedicated a book to her, published in the United States in December 1938. It is entitled Death in the Making. It is a photographic account of ‘death in real time’, as Gerda and he had witnessed it during the past year spent side by side in Spain: in the makeshift trenches of the Republic with soldiers in vests; among the militiamen practising shooting on the beaches of Barcelona; in the frozen faces of children clinging to their mothers beneath the aerial bombardments; and in the lecture theatres of Madrid University reduced to machine-gun posts. A sort of visual diary comprising 111 photographs attributed to Robert Capa, 24 to Taro and 13 to his friend David ‘Chim’ Seymour, himself a renowned photojournalist. On the cover, needless to say, is the photograph of the fatally wounded militiaman.

For almost the entire 20th century, Gerda Taro remained a blurred figure. The turning point came with the discovery of the ‘Mexican suitcase’ in 2007. Which, in reality, was not exactly a suitcase. Rather, it consisted of three boxes containing around 4,500 negatives by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, saved at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and rediscovered in Mexico after decades of obscurity. This precious material was handed over to the International Centre of Photography in New York. It enabled the Spanish Civil War to be reconstructed frame by frame, even though the negative of the iconic image – The Falling Soldier – was never found. It did, however, finally allow Friedmann’s photographs to be distinguished from those taken by Taro.

That discovery gave rise to "The Mexican Suitcase", the exhibition held in New York from September 2010 to May 2011. Finally, the 2012 documentary La maleta mexicana, directed by the Anglo-Mexican filmmaker Trisha Ziff, recounts the incredible story of the discovery of the lost film rolls and their journey from Spain to France, on to Mexico and New York. The Mexican Suitcase did not rewrite the Capa legend. However, it introduced Gerda Taro to the general public and restored her to the place she had lost in the history of photography.

Then came "La ragazza con la Leica" by Helena Janeczek, winner of the 2018 Strega Prize. A fictionalised biography in which, for the first time, the legend of Capa is told from the perspective of the woman who helped create it. It focuses on Gerda Taro: her professional independence, her political acumen, her restlessness, and the freedom she sought. All the complexity of a young life lived with such intensity. The many shades of grey that lend depth to the black and white of photography.

From Helena Janeczek’s book to Alina Marazzi’s film of the same name. "La ragazza con la Leica" successfully opened the ‘Orizzonti’ section of the Venice Biennale this September. Another piece in the puzzle of reconstructing the duality of Robert Capa’s identity and the duality of his gaze. At least during the Spanish Civil War. Where the photographer’s legend was born, whilst half of him was forgotten.