<< BACK

CONTACT

SEARCH

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

Barbican Centre
Silk Street
020 7638 4141
London
This Is War!
Robert Capa at Work
Gerda Taro, a retrospective
On the Subject of War,
artistic responses to Iraq& Afghanistan
October 17, 2008-January 25, 2009

Seven years after the West’s "War on Terror" began in Afghanistan, Barbican Art Gallery reflects on conflict and its visual representation, in a series of interrelated exhibitions, including This is War! Robert Capa at Work, Gerda Taro a retrospective, and On the Subject of War artistic responses to Iraq & Afghanistan.

Robert Capa (1913-1954) is one of the leading photographers of the twentieth century and defined how modern warfare was photographed.

This exhibition, which includes over 150 images, some never-before-seen photographs and newly discovered documents, illuminates Capa’s working process and features many of the photographs that have become iconic images of war.

The exhibition features six of his most important war stories; The Falling Soldier and The Battle of Rio Segre, both capturing the Spanish Civil War; the Sino-Japanese War; American troops landing in Normandy on D-Day; and the liberation of Leipzig, including images of the last man shot in World War II.

In 1936, just a month into the Republican struggle against General Franco’s fascist army, Capa made the most famous image of the Spanish Civil War, Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, now generally known as The Falling Soldier. It was to become the ultimate symbol of the Spanish Loyalist fight and has been dogged by controversy ever since.

For the first time, this exhibition reveals all the known images taken by Capa on that day, including newly discovered negatives which re-surfaced in 2007. These images may shed new light onto the ongoing debate about whether Capa fabricated the most famous war photograph of all time.

Capa was born in Budapest in 1913. A teenager with a precocious interest in literature and radical politics, he was exiled from Hungary at the age of seventeen as a result of his protests against the repressiveness and anti-Semitism of the government. He went to Berlin to study journalism but ended up working as an assistant in the darkroom of an outstanding photojournalistic agency (Dephot), from which he received his first assignment: to photograph the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Early in 1933 Hitler’s rise to power forced the young photographer to move on to Paris, where he covered the tumultuous politics of the anti-fascist coalition of liberals, socialists, and Communists known as the Popular Front. In 1936 Robert Capa went to cover the Spanish Civil War. After Spain, he went on to photograph Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion (1938), Italy, England, France and Germany during World War II (1941-45), the Israeli War for Independence (1948), and the French Indochina War (1954). all appeared in the pages of the leading picture magazines of the day. This was the context in which Capa worked and was known, and where he honed his skills as a master of the cinematic photo narrative. While photographing French maneuvers in the Red River delta, Capa stepped on an anti-personnel mine and was killed on May 25, 1954.

In addition to war photographs, Capa also created an enormous number of images that capture more joyful times — the Tour de France and other sporting events, the Paris cafés, and portraits of his many glamorous and successful friends including Ingrid Bergman, John Huston, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Pablo Picasso.

The talented and groundbreaking German photographer, Gerda Taro (1910-1937) spent her brief but dramatic career photographing the Spanish Civil War alongside Robert Capa, her lover and collaborator. She was one of the first female photographers to work on the frontline and the first to be killed in action in 1937, aged just 26, whilst covering the battle for the city of Brunete.

Taro’s unflinching images of the casualties of war, distinguished by her experimentation with the dynamic camera angles of New Vision photography, are a remarkable contribution to the tradition of war photography. This is the first exhibition of her work in the UK.

Gerda Taro (1910-1937) was a pioneering photojournalist who spent her brief but dramatic career photographing on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War.

Taro’s photographs of the war are a striking but little-known record of an important moment in the history of war photography. They are also evidence of the changing possibilities for women in Europe in the 1930s, through Taro’s personal narrative as well as her photographs of female militia members in Barcelona and Valencia. Taro was the first woman known to have photographed in the heat of battle, and the first to die in action. Though Taro’s promising career was cut short, she produced a body of work that is notable for its animation, commitment, and formal experimentation.

Gerda Taro was born Gerda Pohorylle, daughter of a liberal Polish Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany. The family moved to Leipzig when Gerda was nineteen, where the growing strength of the National Socialists and a new circle of friends drew her into involvement in local leftist organizations. In 1933, she was arrested for participating in an anti-Nazi protest campaign. Eventually realizing that it was too dangerous for her to remain in Germany, she left for Paris.

After a year in Paris spent struggling for work, Gerda met Hungarian photographer André Friedmann, who would later change his name to Robert Capa. A romance developed between Gerda and André, and Gerda increasingly managed the business side of André’s work, while beginning to experiment with taking her own photographs. In February of 1936, she obtained her first press card. Gerda and André, frustrated with their lack of success selling his stories, constructed a fictional American photographer named Robert Capa, under whose identity they might fare better than as one of many Eastern European Jewish émigrés in Paris. Gerda, in turn, changed her last name to Taro, taken from the Japanese artist Taro Okamoto. Both names had Hollywood resonances, too; Capa’s echoing the American filmmaker Frank Capra, and Gerda Taro’s recalling Greta Garbo.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out on July 17, 1936, Taro and Capa immediately arranged to go to Barcelona. The opportunity to photograph active combat, combined with participating in a leftist cause for which emigrés Taro and Capa were deeply sympathetic, was an incomparable opportunity for the pair. They photographed side-by-side, often recording the same scenes. Their pictures from this period are easily distinguishable because they used cameras that produced negatives with different proportions; Taro the square-format Rollei, and Capa the rectangular Leica. In addition, Taro’s work reveals her interest in experimenting with the dynamic camera angles of New Vision photography.

From the outset, the photographic team of Taro and Capa published in magazines with established reputations like Vu in France or the Züricher Illustrierte in Switzerland. Though the work was initially credited “Robert Capa,” it was a collective project to which they both contributed.

Taro and Capa returned to Paris for the fall and early winter, and made a second trip to Spain in February of 1937. Capa remained in Spain only briefly, returning to Paris at the end of the month, while Taro stayed on. It appears that their romance had cooled by this point, and Taro was distinguishing herself with a successful independent career in the French leftist press. Beginning in March of 1937, the byline of her photographs in Regards and the left-wing French Popular Front newspaper Ce Soir reads “Photo Taro.” Some of Taro’s most arresting photographs were taken in the spring of 1937, in a hospital and morgue following the bombing of Valencia. Taro seems to have predated Capa’s famous assertion that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” with her unflinching images of the civilian casualties of the war.

In July 1937, Taro covered the Second International Writers’ Congress on the Defense of Culture at Madrid and then went to Brunete, outside of the capital, to cover fighting for Ce Soir. For two weeks, Taro photographed the battle for the city, and her images were widely reproduced, in part because they demonstrated that the Loyalists were holding the Brunete, despite insurgent claims to the contrary. On July 25, as the Loyalist position faltered, Taro found herself in the midst of a hasty retreat. She jumped on the running-board of a car transporting casualties. A tank sideswiped the car, knocking Taro to the ground. She died the next day. Her body was returned to Paris, where Taro was proclaimed an anti-fascist martyr. Her funeral, which was attended by tens of thousands, took place on what would have been her twenty-seventh birthday.

On the Subject of War artistic responses to Iraq & Afghanistan — Conditions of war have changed since the 1930s and 1940s, but the potential of war photography to shape politics, opinion and lives, remains real.

On the Subject of War presents some of the most significant works of international contemporary art made in the context of current events in Iraq and Afghanistan: Omer Fast’s The Casting, (2007); Geert van Kesteren’s Why Mister, Why?, (2003–04) and Baghdad Calling, (2007); Paul Chan’s Tin Drum Trilogy, (2002–05) and An-My Lê’s 29 Palms, (2006) and Events Ashore, (2005–08).

Each artist reflects on the subjects of war and their experience of conflict — whether as victims, combatants, perpetrators or observers. At the same time, each considers how visual imagery mediates our experience and understanding of conflict, and questions the capacity of art to effect change in a time of war.

The History of Magnum
Two years after the apocalypse that was called the Second World War ended, Magnum Photos was founded. The world's most prestigious photographic agency was formed by four photographers — Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour — who had been very much scarred by the conflict and were motivated both by a sense of relief that the world had somehow survived and the curiosity to see what was still there. They created Magnum in 1947 to reflect their independent natures as both people and photographers — the idiosyncratic mix of reporter and artist that continues to define Magnum, emphasizing not only what is seen but also the way one sees it.

Englishman George Rodger, another of Magnum's founding photographers, recalled how his colleague Robert Capa, the agency's dynamic leader, envisioned the photographers' role after World War II, which had itself been preceded by the invention of smaller, portable cameras and more light-sensitive film: "He recognized the unique quality of miniature cameras, so quick and so quiet to use, and also the unique qualities that we ourselves had acquired during several years of contact with all the emotional excesses that go hand in hand with war. “

These four formed Magnum to allow them and the fine photographers who would follow the ability to work outside the formulas of magazine journalism. The agency departed from conventional practice in two fairly radical ways. It was founded as a co-operative in which the staff would support rather than direct the photographers. Copyright would be held by the authors of the imagery, not by the magazines that published the work. This meant that a photographer could decide to cover a famine somewhere, publish the pictures in Life magazine, and the agency could then sell the photographs to magazines in other countries, such as Paris Match and Picture Post, giving the photographers the means to work on projects that particularly inspired them even without an assignment.

Magnum's first move was to divide the world, rather loosely, into flexible areas of coverage, with Chim in Europe, Cartier-Bresson in India and the Far East, Rodger in Africa, and Capa in the USA. They had some early scoops, such as Robert Capa's first uncensored look behind the Iron Curtain at the Soviet Union with the writer John Steinbeck and Cartier-Bresson's landmark coverage of India at the time of Gandhi's assassination.

It was important for Magnum's photographers to have this flexibility to choose many of their own stories and to work for long periods of time on them. None of them wanted to suffer the dictates of a single publication and its editorial staff. They believed that photographers had to have a point of view in their imagery that transcended any formulaic recording of contemporary events.