By Anna Porter, Queen’s Quarterly 120/3 (Fall 2013)
She was taking pictures as bombs exploded all around them; she photographed planes strafing the retreating soldiers, and kept taking pictures amid bullets and flying rocks, several men blown to pieces. Ted pleaded with her, but Gerda wouldn’t listen. They finally jumped on the running board of a car, and moments later a tank veered into the side of their vehicle, throwing Gerda and Ted into a ditch …
In what was among the most important photographic finds of the twenty-first century, a Mexican filmmaker named Benjamin Tarver discovered a small, tattered suitcase containing some ABF rolls of film by legendary photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David “Chim” Seymour. The negatives, considered lost in the aftermath of the Third Reich, include Capa’s famous photographs of the fall of Barcelona, his harrowing images of the mass exodus from Tarragona, and Taro’s Segovia and the destruction of Madrid, her terrifying take on the plight of the victims. Most but not all of the photos were taken during the Spanish Civil War, between early 1936 and 1939, at a time when war photography – and the risks attached to taking pictures in war zones – was new, and the photographers still believed these images could make a difference in the unfolding tragedy they witnessed – before the word “embedded” appeared as part of a photographer’s equipment.
