Seventy years after her death, the photographer Gerda Taro, whose work was
overshadowed by her romance with Robert Capa, will receive her first major
exhibition.

By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: NYT, September 22, 2007

Sometime in the spring of 1936, the lovers and photographers André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle changed their names and, in the process, the history of photography. To distinguish themselves from other Jewish émigrés in Paris at the time, Mr. Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, took the name Robert Capa; Ms. Pohorylle, also Jewish and born in Poland, became Gerda Taro. Working at times as “Capa,” an imaginary American photographer, they began documenting the Spanish Civil War, capturing the ruined towns and devastated civilians and soldiers on the Republican side.

Mr. Capa went on to become one of the world’s greatest war photographers. But Ms. Taro, seen by many as the first woman known to photograph a battle from the front lines and to die covering a war, survived in the public eye mostly for her romance with Mr. Capa.

Now, 70 years after Ms. Taro’s death at age 26, the first major exhibition of her work begins Wednesday at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. Many of Ms. Taro’s sympathetic and graphic photographs of upporters of the Spanish Republic will be seen for the first time. The exhibition is one of four concurrent shows at the Center related to the Spanish Civil War, including a display of Capa war pictures.

“This is really a discovery,” Willis E. Hartshorn, the director at I.C.P., said of the exhibition and new research on Ms. Taro. “It adds immeasurably to the perspectives and history of photography,” he said, “a history that in a great many ways is being written as we speak.

“For the first time, we really understand the scope and scale of her work,” Mr. Hartshorn said.

Ms. Taro’s celebrity was short-lived but outsize. Shortly after establishing herself independently of Mr. Capa, she was sideswiped by a tank after jumping onto the running board of a car transporting casualties during the battle of Brunete, and killed. Her funeral in Paris (on Aug. 1, 1937, which would have been her 27th birthday) drew thousands who hailed her as a martyr to anti-Fascism. The French writer Louis Aragon and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda were among those in attendance. Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor, designed her memorial.

Because the two photographers worked together, some of Ms. Taro’s photographs were published under Mr. Capa’s name or with a joint byline, while others were lost, Mr. Hartshorn said. The I.C.P. show, which includes about 100 of her photographs, highlights her as an artist in her own right and as an important figure in both the changing role of women and the use of art as propaganda.

“War photography and propaganda are inseparable,” Irme Schaber, Ms. Taro’s biographer and one of the show’s curators, said in an e-mail message. “Moreover, Gerda Taro was a woman photographer in a war that is retrospectively seen as the first modern media war because of the rise of war photography, photojournalism, magazine and film.”

Jordana Mendelson, an art historian and an associate professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, said Ms. Taro left behind “an extraordinary document of war” that was lost until now.

“Taro is part of a small pantheon of women photographers who saw photography as an extension of their political commitment and of their role as new women,” Ms. Mendelson said.

The 184-page catalog that accompanies the exhibition is the first book about Ms. Taro to be published in English. It includes her photographs, her biography and the tale of how some of her work was discovered in 1980, stacked in boxes among Mr. Capa’s papers and prints in the Manhattan apartment of Cornell Capa, Robert’s brother and the founder of the I.C.P., and his wife, Edie. The book is edited by Ms. Schaber, an independent scholar based in Germany; Richard Whelan, who published a definitive biography of Mr. Capa in 1985 and who died this year; and I.C.P.’s associate curator, Kristen Lubben.

“Defiant farmers, fists clenched, photographed from audacious angles — it is not least because of such mutual demonstrations of self-confidence in front of and behind the camera that the Spanish Civil War has been perceived as a romantic conflict,” Ms. Schaber writes in the catalog of Ms. Taro’s role in creating the visual language of war photography.

Among her work at the center, on display through Jan. 6, will be photographs of Republican militia women training on the beach outside Barcelona in 1936, a photograph from the same year of a man getting a haircut at the headquarters of the fifth regiment in Madrid, and a 1937 image of a sleeping child refugee from Málaga in Almería.

Ms. Taro’s work was published in the Parisian newspaper Ce Soir and in the French magazine Regards, among other places; in this country, her death was reported in Life magazine, which also ran some of her photographs.

But after her brief career ended, a flood of photographs of World War II helped push her work off the stage, Ms. Lubben said. In later years, she had the stigma of being “a communist heroine,” Ms. Schaber noted in her e-mail. As a result, Ms. Taro all but disappeared from public consciousness.

With the I.C.P. show, “we’re trying to redress the crimes of history,” Ms. Lubben said. “A lot of it has to do with being in the shadow of this man, whose career was so renowned. And part of the reason she is lost to history is people don’t know what photos she took,” she said, noting the frequent errors of attribution of Ms. Taro’s work.

“She has a different aesthetic than Capa,” Ms. Lubben said. “Her pictures are much more posed, using strong camera angles. Capa was much more into movement.”

For Mr. Capa, his relationship with Ms. Taro was “a very painful private matter,” Ms. Schaber wrote in an e-mail message, and he never attempted to officially commemorate her except in his book “Death in the Making,” about the Spanish Civil War.

Just what history will make of Ms. Taro’s newly robust story is too early to tell, said Naomi Rosenblum, an art historian and the author of “A History of Women Photographers.”

“She died so young and her career was so short, her significance wasn’t so much in photography — though it was significant — but can be attributed to the fact that a woman did go and involve herself in battlefield photographs,” Ms. Rosenblum said. “Taro and Capa represent a sort of romantic vision of the stateless person involving themselves in terrible battles: the social battles, the political battles of the time.”

par André Gunthert, maître de conférences à l’EHESS, directeur du Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine à Paris, revient dans son blog www.arhv.lhivic.org sur l’impact des images de Gaza publiées dans la presse.

«Scandalisé par la une de l’Humanité du 7 janvier, Alain Korkos, chroniqueur du site Arrêt sur images, publie une "Lettre ouverte à Pierre Laurent", le directeur de la rédaction du journal, dans laquelle il condamne l’usage de cette "photo insoutenable" d’une enfant morte sous les décombres dans la bande de Gaza (due à Fadi Adwan, de l’agence AP). Rapprochant cette image de celle d’Omayra Sanchez en Colombie, prise par Frank Fournier et publiée par Paris-Match en 1985, Korkos accuse l’Humanité d’avoir voulu choquer pour "vendre une idée et, accessoirement, du papier (ou inversement)." S’appuyant sur une citation de Susan Sontag, il écrit : "Vous êtes entré dans une logique allant à l’inverse de vos espérances : au lieu de faire prendre conscience au chaland de ce qui se joue à Gaza, vous l’avez paralysé dans l’horreur". Le rapprochement d’images est une méthode qu’Alain Korkos a largement déployée sur son blog, la Boîte à images, avant de l’acclimater à Arrêt sur images, où il est le seul véritable spécialiste de l’analyse iconographique. Cette méthode montre ici ses limites. Car, s’il est vrai qu’une image renvoie à d’autres images, la pertinence d’une comparaison se mesure à la compatibilité des contextes, dont on a souvent montré à quel point ils influent sur la lecture.

Est-il pertinent d’associer l’image d’Omayra Sanchez, victime d’une catastrophe naturelle, et celle de la petite Kaukab Al Dayah, victime civile d’actes de guerre ? Selon Korkos, quelle que soit la différence de contexte, "le chaland qui passe à l’ombre du kiosque n’a pas le temps d’opérer cette distinction, aussi juste soit-elle. Il se prend dans la face la photo de Gaza qui lui rappelle immédiatement celle de Colombie". En réalité, entrevoir une parenté entre ces deux images n’est possible qu’à la condition de percevoir l’invasion israélienne de Gaza […] comme une tragédie dont nul, sinon le destin, n’est responsable. A cette aune, on peut reprocher à l’Humanité son sensationnalisme vain, qui alimente un voyeurisme sordide. En revanche, si l’on est sensible à l’asymétrie du conflit israélo-palestinien et à la démesure des opérations de Tsahal, la photo de Fadi Adwan accède à une autre catégorie d’images, celles de la dénonciation des crimes de guerre, où elle rejoint les gueules cassées de 1914-1918 ou la fillette brûlée par le napalm photographiée par Nick Ut.

Une catégorie considérée comme noble et légitime, alors même qu’elle s’appuie sur des procédés rhétoriques souvent simplistes. Si l’on y voit de si nombreuses images d’enfants, c’est que ceux-ci symbolisent par excellence l’innocence martyrisée. Pourtant, dans ce cas, le "choc" produit par l’image est jugé salutaire : la guerre doit faire horreur. C’est ce même principe qui a présidé après-guerre à la publication des photographies des camps d’extermination nazis, au nom d’une "pédagogie de l’horreur" revendiquée. […]

«Est-il scandaleux de publier une image "insoutenable" ? On voit bien qu’en juger relève avant tout de notre appréciation du contexte, ainsi que de l’intention prêtée au lieu de publication. L’image-choc est aussi vieille que la presse illustrée. […] La photo est depuis longtemps utilisée par la presse comme un langage. "Jamais une photographie n’a mis fin à une guerre", tranche Korkos. Pourtant, si l’image n’était pas si dangereuse en temps de guerre, à quoi servirait d’interdire le champ de bataille aux journalistes ? Pourquoi la censure ? A quoi bon la propagande ? Certes, une photographie n’est jamais identifiable comme la cause unique de l’arrêt d’un conflit. Mais ce sont les centaines d’illustrations diffusées par nos médias qui informent notre imaginaire, favorisent l’acceptation d’une guerre ou la rendent progressivement insupportable. Les images sont déterminantes dans la gestion d’un conflit. L’Huma le sait visiblement mieux qu’Alain Korkos. […]

Pour la presse d’information, le choix de l’image-choc est toujours un risque, susceptible de froisser une partie du lectorat. Compte tenu de la profonde division de l’opinion à l’endroit de la question palestinienne, la plupart des médias occidentaux ont choisi la prudence. En revanche, la photo de Kaukab Al Dayah a fait la une de nombreux quotidiens du monde arabe. Clairement rattaché à la tradition de l’imagerie pacifiste, le choix de l’Humanité est bien une prise de parti politique avec laquelle on peut ou non être d’accord, selon ses convictions. Mais comparer ce geste avec le sensationnalisme de Paris-Match est se tromper d’analyse.»