Eyes of the World Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention of Modern Photojournalism

by Desconhecido

  To Capa and Taro, to everyone, this war is not just about Spain—this is the struggle of their generation. This is a war that will determine the fate of Europe and whether it will indeed fall under the dark spell of fascism. A reporter for the Soviet newspaper Pravda describes the struggle for Spain as going “far beyond the trenches of Madrid; it goes right through Europe, through the whole world.”

  The New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews sees what the conflict in Spain means to young people: “This world will not be worth living in if fascism triumphs.”

  Capa and Taro are going to use the new technology—their lightweight cameras—to capture the story, to win over good souls everywhere, to be the eyes of the world. To support the Spanish Republic is a kind of claim, a cross between a passionate wish and a firm declaration. Capa and Taro know, with searing certainty, the danger of fascism; they have experienced it firsthand. If Spain can stand against the generals, fascism everywhere can be defeated. And so the two young, newly anointed photographers board a plane that Vogel has hired to get them and other journalists there.

  First stop: Barcelona.

  This August 1936 Vu cover captures the energy of the citizenswho rose up to defend the Republic against the rebel armies.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FIRST STOP: REVOLUTION

  AUGUST 1936

  IT IS AUGUST in Barcelona, an elegant city perched on the blue Mediterranean Sea. The air is hot, muggy, still. Capa and Taro have come to shoot a war. Instead they find a living revolution.

  Capa and Taro’s purpose is to show Spain to the world through their cameras, bringing this war to the eyes of magazine readers through-out Europe and beyond. The maga- zine Vu has sent them, but they have no salary; they will earn only as much money as the pictures they sell. Even getting their photos back to Paris editors can be risky and challenging. They must always be alert, finding out when another journalist or a courier is heading back to Paris and can take a package of their prints or negatives to an editor or agency. Taro is being especially daring, since no woman has ever gone into a combat zone to take photographs. But they know that readers, especially those on the left, are hungry for news and images. They hope to find the strong Spanish standing up against fascism, the people united to defeat the grim generals.

  Quickly the two gain their bearings, amazed at all the ways the city has been transformed. Barcelona is cosmopolitan and modern: white stone apartment buildings with wrought iron balconies look out on promenades that are shaded by the thick foliage of palm and plane trees. Barcelona’s fiercely independent residents speak not Spanish but Catalan—a separate language descended directly from Latin. Every major political party in the rest of Spain has a local affiliate here that uses Catalan and has its own ideas. The Catalans are not just interested in defeating Franco; they aim to transform their own lives, shedding centuries-old customs and structures of power. Barcelona has turned into a revolutionary dream.

  The Hotel Ritz, which used to cater only to the wealthy, is now a place for free meals. Its fancy lobby is filled with long tables where, all day, residents come in to eat. Factories and stores have been taken over by workers; private property has been confiscated. All cars now belong to the government in order to serve the war effort. Local trams and taxis are painted black—the color of anarchism. Free public schools and nurseries have been opened for all children, ending the Catholic Church’s long domination of education. No one wears business suits anymore; bankers and plumbers put on the same one-piece canvas coveralls. Even language has changed. Traditional Spanish and Catalan require a person to speak deferentially to those of high status and informally to social inferiors. Now señor and doña and the formal usted have been abandoned; everyone is addressed the same way, as compadre, comrade.

  Taro makes this August 1936 send-off to the front look more like good-byes before a vacation. The photos by Taro and Capa through page 53 were all taken that month in Barcelona.

  Barcelona is “startling and overwhelming,” writes a young man named Eric Blair, who uses the pen name George Orwell. He is thrilled at the mood of the city. “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red-and-black flag of the anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties.”

  As Capa and Taro roam the Barcelona streets, they’re soon caught up in the spirit of the place. Their photographs capture the city’s mood of hope, excitement, and limitless possibility. Their lenses find the joyous spirit in which residents have taken up arms and are remaking their society: soldiers gladly loading bread into a truck or passing guns to new recruits. Smiling young men look out a window cracked from an earlier battle. Little boys happily scamper on sandbagged walls, donning anarchist caps like any children playing war games. Father and son cheer a bullfight and rally presented by one of the Left parties. All around are signs of this living revolution.

  Taro captures three relaxed men at the headquarters of a Catalan Communist Party and boys using sandbags as a playground. In these images, she sees a mood of hope and joy in revolutionary Barcelona.

  Taro’s image of a child and his soldier father at a bullfight in Barcelona is about family instead of war.

  Taro especially is pleased to see women wearing practical clothes: the trademark blue coveralls and rope-soled shoes, called alpargatas, or trousers and men’s shirts and ties. Young women strolling up and down streets wearing blue coveralls or sitting unaccompanied in cafés is remarkable in conservative Spain, which sees a woman’s place as confined to the home. “When we went into the villages, people would say, ‘A woman in trousers!’ ” one anarchist woman says. “My parents kicked me out of the house for wearing trousers.”

  Soon Taro dresses like the other liberated women—baggy pants cinched with a belt, rope shoes, her hair cut spikey short. Her tomboy look makes it easier to shoot and maneuver around. Though she is using a Reflex-Korelle, where one must look down into the viewfinder to frame a shot, she manages the camera with no trouble; Taro is “small but enormously strong and fit, so the size of the camera didn’t require any effort.”

  Using Taro’s contacts from the German socialist party and her modest knowledge of Spanish, the young couple make their way to the headquarters of POUM, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. The Workers Party of Marxist Unification is a popular and independent-minded communist group fiercely opposed to Stalin and dead set against following the lead of the Soviet Union. Its ideas are similar to the views she heard and shared with groups in Germany and then Paris.

  On a beach next to the lapping Mediterranean, Taro crouches in the sand and photographs loyalist militiawomen training. She shows women proudly conferring with one another, dressed in uniforms with leather ammunition cartridges pinned to their belts. One of her most famous shots shows a silhouetted woman taking aim with her pistol. That photo and the others will be used in a two-page spread for Vu to show how women are a part of this historic struggle.

  This has become one of Taro’s most famous photos—a young Spanish woman taking up arms to fight for a new kind of Spain.

  Women in Spain had never been allowed to fight with weapons; no one could even imagine them as soldiers or in the police force. In revolutionary Barcelona, that has changed. This woman is unlike any woman seen in Spain before; she is a symbol of power, strength, and independence—a young woman fiercely in charge.

  Many of Taro’s pictures of the loyalist militia are taken slightly from below, which makes each figure look tall and imposing in the photograph. Under the open summer sunlight, their faces are strong and molded; one sees the angles of their noses, the defined jaws, the squinting eyes that gaze out at the horizon. Her shots depict the common people as warriors, larger than life, idealized. The troops may be ragtag, with mismatched uniforms, rusty rifles, and a mix of caps, black berets, and he
lmets, but they are unified in their heroism, their unwavering sense of purpose. This is a people’s army.

  Capa and Taro are in Spain to educate the eyes of the rest of Europe, but there is also a clash of images going on right in front of them. Every wall, building, and passing car tells a story in scrawled graffiti, dramatic posters, and blazing colors. “The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud,” Orwell observes. The posters are intense propaganda, since in Spain at this time, 40 percent of women and 25 percent of men cannot read or write. In the countryside, the numbers are as high as 90 percent.

  This documentary photo from Madrid shows the poster war—images on every possible surface advertised one political party or another.

  The vivid posters speak as loudly as bullhorns, proclaiming the message of the revolution—and recruiting bodies to fight on the front. Mujeres Libres, an anarchist organization for women, advertises its cause by depicting a woman in a long gown thrusting both arms in the air as she faces a row of guns. Other posters show fighters, muscled men grasping rifles, all with blaring, colorful headlines. The heroism of the posters can be felt everywhere. Orwell heard loudspeakers “bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night.” Everywhere there is the slogan of the Republic: No pasarán, they shall not pass.

  Despite the steady drumbeat of recruiting and training and news of guns crackling hundreds of miles away, many of the pictures Capa and Taro take during their first weeks in Spain show festive, happy people. At the Barcelona train station, a soldier embraces his wife before he swings onto the departing train. A group of soldiers clamber onto one another like a football huddle, grinning—all with their arms raised in the Popular Front salute. War is a kind of grand and lighthearted party. Even the little bit of military action shown—sandbagged trenches, marching—reflects a hopeful city preparing to defend itself.

  Equality, community—surely this is what excites Taro and Capa. Perhaps they see something of themselves in these young people volunteering and marching off to war. Their photos almost vibrate with a sense of adventure and common purpose. Here is a city filled with men and women trying to forge a new way of living. Barcelona captures the yearnings, hopes, and dreams they exchanged over stolen pastries in the Paris cafés. Perhaps there is a wish behind these pictures: be safe, win, stop the fascists—and we will all be safe.

  A good-bye between a man and a woman. Notice that she, too, carries a gun in a holster, exemplifying the ideal of equality between men and women during this period. This photo by Capa echoes Taro’s photo of the kneeling woman.

  One of Taro’s best images is of a man and a woman leaning back in two wicker chairs, heads tilted to each other, exchanging laughter. The man casually holds a rifle between them. There’s an easy grace to the photo—men and women as comfortable compadres. Capa photographs the very same couple, at the same moment, from a slightly different angle, though it is Taro’s version that will be published in a magazine. She and Capa are like twins, intuitively connected, bonded even in what they notice. You cannot help sensing their own story in the two pictures: in photographing this relaxed man and woman, Taro and Capa are capturing themselves at their best. At this moment in time, this moment in history, they are equals, friends, lovers. They are one, united.

  Capa records the jubilant leave-taking of soldiers on a train to the front.

  BLOOD IN THE BULLRING

  Underneath the dream of a new society, there is a dark side to this revolution. Capa and Taro have arrived after the blood is washed away from the streets, after the executions of officers seen as loyal to the army, after the mobs pillage Barcelona and Madrid. Yes, women have been liberated, but they are also protecting themselves, making sure they are not seen as being rich or on the “wrong” side. Wealthy families know enough to put on the costume of the worker to save themselves.

  Capa’s and Taro’s twin photos of the couple in Barcelona. During this period, you can tell the photographer by the format: His, on the left, taken with a Leica, is a rectangle. Hers, on the right, is a square format from the Reflex-Korelle. Magazines chose to print Taro’s shot.

  Spain is often called the land of sun and shadow, and that is not just a description of the landscape. The phrase suggests two sides of Spanish history and culture: glory and cruelty. Indeed, the spirit of vengeance runs like a deadly electrical current in divided Spain, sparking the worst in people. In the early days of the military uprising and the revolution, the country erupts with horrific violence.

  On the right, the rebels think nothing of murdering those they see as betrayers, as weak, as not fitting their vision of the nation. On August 18, just a month after the rebellion began, the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca was taken by fascists and shot. The poet was known for his sympathy for the Roma (Gypsies) and the poor, and for his homosexuality; he, and anyone like him, is to be wiped out. One of his great poems is a lament on the death of a bullfighter killed in the ring. The last lines of that poem, translated here, could be Lorca’s own epitaph:

  Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you.

  For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.

  Of the signal maturity of your understanding.

  Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.

  Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.

  It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born

  an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure.

  I sing of his elegance with words that groan,

  and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.

  Falangists, who are fascists but do not believe in the restoration of the monarchy, have joined the rebels. The Falangists are fierce fighters, and in Granada their squads drag leftists from their homes at night to shoot them in the cemetery. In the town of Badajoz, American journalist Jay Allen sees two Falangists stop a tall man and “hold him while a third pulled back his shirt, baring his right shoulder. The black and blue marks of a rifle butt could be seen.” The man was sent off to a bullring to await his fate. All night Allen sees men, their arms raised as in surrender, being brought to the same spot. At four in the morning, they are herded into the ring and shot. For twelve hours, Allen tells readers in the Chicago Tribune, the shooting went on, leaving eighteen hundred people, men and women, executed. Seeing this cold-blooded massacre leaves Allen “sick at heart and in body.”

  On the left, there are youth gangs who are as deadly as the Falangists. And some of the Left leaders have the icy will of tyrants. They are less interested in defeating Franco than in pressing forward a total revolution—no matter who or what gets in the way. They are cold, abstract, and unconcerned with the blood price of their dreams. The goal of total revolution means no individual is as important as the final triumph of the people. Anyone may be sacrificed. Because the Catholic Church is seen as a conservative force that oppresses peasants and women, rage has been let loose on its centuries-old churches with their magnificent statues. Thousands of priests, nuns, and devout Catholics are murdered.

  In this 1936 image by an unknown photographer, Taro is no longer the Parisian sophisticate; her hair, her overalls, and her look are that of a Spanish revolutionary.

  Aleksander Szurek, a volunteer for the loyalist side, strolls into a village square, where he sees “a group of peasants burning the broken church altar and holy pictures.” He scolds them, saying, “These may be of artistic value. You shouldn’t do that.” One peasant looks at him “as if to say it was none of my business and quietly threw another piece of the altar on the fire. The others never looked at me, nor did they say a word. I felt their hatred.”

  The Spain that Capa and Taro are visiting is in a revolution, but how deep is the change? How much are people just surviving, making sure that they don’t get picked out, dragged into a prison cell, perhaps even murdered? Is that daughter of the former factory owner wearing coveralls because she beli
eves in the cause of brotherhood, or because she does not want her family to be singled out? This is what happens in revolutions. Social orders are capsized. But what turns may turn again. No one knows who will win in the end, or what Spain will become.

  Taken in August or September 1936, Capa sees a pensive Taro in the countryside.

  EL CAMPESINO

  After a couple of weeks, Capa and Taro have seen enough of the new society in Barcelona; they are itching to get to some action. They did come to photograph a war, after all.

  The conflict is no longer near the city—they hear it has moved north and west. Franco’s rebels have succeeded in capturing a good deal of northern Spain, parts of the west, key cities in the south, and the southernmost tip, by Cádiz, along with their original base, Spanish Morocco. A crucial front is in Aragon, a region to the west of Catalonia, which marks the edge of Franco’s territory. The government needs to push back in Aragon so that it can weaken the rebels and eventually circle back and protect the capital of Madrid, in the center of the country.

  The young photographers find a car that will take them through the Ebro valley. Their driver steers up a long dry channel that follows the Ebro River and leads west from the coast to the front in Aragon. Along the Ebro, the yellow land rises into undulating mountains, some dotted with thick fir trees, cooling streams, and caves; here the ground is rocky and crumbling, choked with scrub brush and pale grasses that scrape and scratch one’s knees. Here the skies are wide open, leaving everyone exposed to whatever elements shall rain down.

  Here, too, is ancient Spain—farmers shaking grain in a sieve, raking hay onto carts, riding donkeys piled high with bales of straw, using the same tools as their ancestors. Much of Spain is like this: still in the Middle Ages. Vast areas of land are owned by big landowners, often aristocrats whose titles date back hundreds of years. The land is farmed by millions who have barely enough to eat and are no more than serfs. In “this tawny land shaped like a bull’s hide stretched to dry in the sun,” as Jay Allen has written, olives are grown in ancient gnarled trees and wheat is threshed in tiny villages. Children on the estates are lucky if they have even a year of schooling. They spend their days pulling donkeys through the fields or helping their parents, who barely eke out a living working the crops.