Robert Capa and Gerda Taro: love in a time of war

Robert Capa and Gerda Taro: love in a time of war It begins with a photograph. On her release, she used a fake passport to travel overland to Paris, where she was looked after by a communist network. Though Friedmann could seldom afford to buy film and often had to pawn his camera to survive in Paris, he schooled Pohorylle in the rudiments of photography and found her a job in the newly formed Alliance Photo picture agency. "She picked him up, gave him direction. Taro then returned to Spain alone, despite the growing concerns of her friends who, having seen her recent photographs of the fighting, feared for her safety. Though the context of the photograph is still contested, the imagined conversation does describe what probably happened that day just before a Francoist sniper returned fire from across the hills, killing the militiaman who was running down the hill for Capa's camera. In Spain, Capa soon developed a fantastic reputation for taking photographs no matter what the risk, setting the tone for war reportage as we now know it. It is the only way to walk the path. By then, she too had experienced radical politics, arrest and flight. Transported to a nearby field hospital, Taro died from her injuries in the early hours of the following morning. They both believed that their photographs could change the world and change the way people think. And their photographs did. Allan protected her with a film camera as shrapnel and rocks fell around them. One always writes with one foot on the ground and the other in the air. She was arrested by the Nazis on 19 March 1933 and interrogated about a supposed Bolshevik plot to overthrow Hitler. He was in a bad way when they met, and maybe without her it would have been the end for him. Capa went on to become the most famous of the two, and arguably the most famous war photographer of the 20th century due to his visceral images of the D-day landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy. His most famous estimate would become a dictum by which ensuing generations of war photographers worked: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. With the Spanish civil war as its main backdrop, the narrative is an uneasy, sometimes awkward, merging of fact and fiction, and will almost certainly offend the many guardians of both Capa and Taro's reputations just as it will no doubt entrance the mainstream cinema-going audience should it be made into a Hollywood film. This is reflected in the dialogue, the literary tension, the humour, the fights, the passion, the sex, the mixed feelings. That's part of the novelist's job. Their lives were entwined, but she was very much her own woman, and he knew that. She had reinvented herself - but the Capa myth was so strong that, even when she died, some newspapers described her as Robert Capa's wife. "She was a pioneering woman both as a photographer and a political activist," says Ziff. Together, André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle would change their names and their destiny, becoming Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the most celebrated visual chroniclers of the Spanish civil war. She travelled back and forth to the frontlines, shooting what she saw, often driven by a mix of humanity, political commitment and a shrewd understanding of the power of the photograph to shape public opinion. Throughout 1937, Taro visited several frontlines, either with Capa or on her own. On Sunday 25July, the pair found themselves trapped in a foxhole near Brunete as bombs fell around them relentlessly. Then, as republican troops began pulling out of the area, Taro and Allan ran out of the foxhole and hitched a ride on the running board of a car while the planes continued to strafe the retreating convoy. In the chaos, the car was then rammed by an out-of-control republican tank and the couple were thrown into the dirt. She was 26. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro: love in a time of war Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 14/05/2012