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

by Desconhecido

  El Campesino: As framed in this Taro photograph, the farmer is the essence of the Spanish land. He is hardworking and enduring, using ancient tools to harvest the fruits of the earth. This image exists only in a notebook of shots Capa and Taro shared.

  This is part of the poignancy and drama of the conflict in Spain: a land where peasants have been farming the same way for centuries is the scene of battle with the world’s most advanced guns, tanks, and airplanes. Taro wants readers to feel how naked and exposed the Spaniards are to the weapons of war. She takes a striking picture of one man, an unshaven farmer, El Campesino, with his handmade wooden pitchfork against a mottled sky. A hero of the earth and sky—who would doubt whom we must defend?

  Farmers in the countryside were far from the urban revolution in Barcelona, but Capa and Taro were traveling in Aragon in August, where people who had never owned land were forming collective farms. Photograph by Taro.

  The photos she and Capa take on the way to the front portray a second kind of workers’ paradise—very different from Barcelona with its women in pants and taxicabs sporting anarchist black. In Aragon, many of the large farms have been turned into collectives. The once poor, starving, illiterate peasants have taken over large estates and now collectively own and manage them. During this time seventeen hundred agrarian collectives will be created throughout Spain, involving over three million people. The images of the farmers, working side by side, pitching bales of hay, are also an image of the enduring common people melded with the new, the revolutionary. The collective farm, like the free food in the Hotel Ritz, is the Left’s hopeful dream of Spain.

  A set of Capa negatives shot in August or September shows Taro playing with a donkey.

  WHERE IS THE WAR?

  Capa and Taro are frustrated. They came to Aragon to photograph actual combat, but even here there are no battles. Instead there is a stalemate. The loyalist government forces have dug their trenches and pushed their heavy guns and cannons up the rocky hills, but mostly they are waiting. There is so little happening that Taro and Capa ask the soldiers to stage some action, running down the steep, grassy hillside, pretending to shoot at the enemy.

  Back in the Barcelona sunshine, the homemade troops, with their haphazard uniforms and their rusty muskets, looked romantic. But the reality of this war is stillness and more stillness, “the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare,” writes George Orwell. Orwell will soon join a POUM unit up in the hills, not far from where Capa and Taro are now traveling. Dug into the earth and mud, hanging on to their positions, and occasionally trading gunfire with the rebels who are hiding up in the high ridges, he and the other soldiers remain stuck doing very little.

  Still in search of a real battle, Capa and Taro set out for Madrid.

  LATE AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1936

  Sitting in the dry and hot Castilian plains in the center of the country, Madrid is crucial, both symbolically and strategically. As the capital, Madrid represents the center of power. The grand buildings tell the story of the history of Spain as an empire, ruled by monarchy and the Catholic Church. The Prado Museum is filled with treasures and the country’s most famous paintings. The city is also key geographically: if Madrid is encircled or captured, the cause of the Republic is almost certainly lost.

  In the first weeks of fighting, the rebels have managed to take a chain of cities to the south of Madrid: Seville, Córdoba, and Granada. The government has not been able to make them turn back. Now, with fascist troops pressing in from both the south and the northern hills, Madrid is in grave danger of falling to Franco.

  When Taro and Capa arrive in the grand capital, they find a city bracing for an attack. Tunnels have been dug underground. Trenches snake around the city’s environs. Barricades made of paving stones line the streets. Militia seen as loyal to Franco are exposed, tried, and sometimes swiftly executed. Everyone is tense, waiting.

  Taro uses her camera to focus on the way that civilian life is being transformed. She captures a recruit getting a haircut. A close-up of a war orphan, loyalist cap perched on his head, shows him eyeing her warily as he scoops up a mouthful of soup. Capa takes a fascinating shot of a rebel officer being interrogated. The shot bristles with drama: the skeptical officer on the government side; the rebel commander, still in uniform, arms outstretched, hands open, as if to say, What, me? I know nothing! Surrounding them is a crowd of haggard loyalist volunteers, intent, listening closely, some in caps, others in head scarves. A single image tells the story of a country divided, of the fear of spies and betrayal.

  For a brief few days, Capa and Taro focus on Toledo, a medieval city south of Madrid. There, throngs of journalists and onlookers mill at the base of the Alcázar, a turreted castle that looms over this sunbaked city. Colonel Moscardó, a defiant rebel, has barricaded himself inside the fortress with one thousand troops, local women and children, and about a hundred leftist hostages. “I love Spain and have confidence in General Franco,” he declares. “It would be dis-honorable to surrender the arms of caballeros [knights] to the Red rabble!”

  In the suspicious faces of the soldiers and the puzzled gesture of this captured rebel officer, a photographer, perhaps Chim, caught the mood of anger and mistrust that ran through Spain. A rebel general claimed that four columns of men were advancing on Madrid and a hidden “fifth column” lived in the city, ready to betray its defenders, which is the origin of the expression. No one knew for certain whom they could trust.

  Day after day people wait, but the siege does not end. The rebels and their hostages are surviving in intolerable conditions—lamps made of sardine cans, garbage tossed out of windows, soldiers sick with dysentery, constant shelling and bombing. The government’s plans to dynamite the thick walls of the castle are stalled. For Capa and Taro—like everyone else—the Alcázar has become a symbol of a war that simply won’t move forward.

  Taro, Capa, and Chim all photographed children, especially orphans—showing how the youngest are affected by war. This Taro photo is from 1936 or 1937.

  Finally Capa and Taro hear encouraging news about Córdoba, the rebel-held medieval city nestled in the steep mountains of Andalusia. This is a region of snow-white houses with thick-timbered roofs, the legacy of centuries of Muslim rule. Government troops are about to launch an offensive to take the city back.

  In the early days of September, excited by what they are about to see, the couple heads south across the plain of La Mancha and over the Sierra Morena, seeking that elusive government triumph. Instead, they are met by streams of refugees hurrying down a dusty, open road, fleeing the small village of Cerro Muriano. On September 5, bombers began firing on government troops stationed in the surrounding hills. Then the rebels launched an attack from Córdoba itself. The loyalist push Taro and Capa hoped to witness has instead turned into a chaotic, scrambling retreat. As the merciless summer sun beats down, men and women leave the area on donkeys and on foot, clutching their bundles, with children hiked on their hips. Villagers have become homeless refugees racing for shelter and scanning the skies for terrifying planes. Capa and Taro capture the stream of refugees. The photos are heartbreaking—and rushed back to Paris.

  The two photographers press on.

  CAPA AND TARO have been in Spain for a full month, and they have not yet photographed any real military action or drama. Still, they’ve changed. Taro, the chic girl of Paris, is now used to rough living and coarse clothes. She no longer colors her hair red but keeps it short, bleached by the sun. She’s grown confident in her use of the Reflex-Korelle camera. She frames powerful, heroic shots of individuals.

  Refugees flee bombing in Cerro Muriano in September 1936.

  There is insight behind her eye; her use of the camera is unafraid, catching a person’s direct gaze, like the orphan boy in Madrid who stops midway in eating his soup to look at her. What did he make of the pretty young woman with tousled hair, dressed like a man, who leans forward, peers into her camera, and presses the shutter? People who meet Ca
pa and Taro during the war always speak of her infectious laugh, how lightly she carries herself. For all the destruction she witnesses, she remains high-spirited, playful. “They both had a way of not appearing to take anything seriously,” says Herbert Matthews, the New York Times reporter.

  Clemente Cimorra, a Spanish journalist, notices the couple as they travel across the Córdoba area during this time, and remarks that they are “almost children. Unarmed, with little more in their hands but a camera, watching without the slightest trace of fear the circling of a plane that was dipping in a worrying fashion about their heads.”

  Capa is also gaining confidence as a photographer. His images are different from Taro’s—he likes to whip out his palm-seized Leica and capture the blur of movement, the danger that is close by. They have not found combat, but in their search they have refined their special talent, the way their photos can be more than documents—they can tell stories. Both photographers connect with their subjects, which the person on the other side of the lens can sense. They find the human drama at the center of whatever action is taking place. While Capa and Taro are fiercely loyal to the Left—they will only photograph the government side—in the midst of this war of ideas, of competing ideologies, theirs is a photography of compassion.

  Taro and Capa are drawn to children. Her images of orphans eating together and playing are haunting. Both Capa and Taro understand that their worth as photographers depends on their capacity to connect with the people they depict. They are creating photos that are meant to make viewers feel as if they were right there beside the faces in the image.

  Capa used any angle he could find to give a sense of action. Here, in this September 1936 shot, he shows soldiers training.

  Capa’s advice about how to be a good photographer is simple: “like people and let them know it.”

  Now, as the couple leaves the terrible scene of refugees, their luck—and their lives—are about to change.

  A SOLDIER FALLS

  The day, like all late summer days in southern Spain, is warm. The orange sun throws crisp shadows on the ground. Summer’s punishing heat has begun to drain from the earth. The fields are sheared, the crops harvested, leaving a bare, open landscape.

  The couple has joined a small loyalist unit near the village of Espejo. There, sometime after the siesta period—1:00 to 3:30 PM, when traditionally no fighting takes place—a band of soldiers begins maneuvers on the hillside. Taro and Capa photograph them running across a field, positioning themselves in a gully, and aiming their rifles. The men wear caps with tassels, and cartridge belts are strapped diagonally across their chests. Capa moves in front of the group, sometimes twisting around to get his shot, while Taro brings up the rear. The men run once more up a hill, their commander waving them on, then down again into a gully. At some point, a shot rings out. A tall soldier’s arms fly out from his sides; his gun drops from his hand. Capa presses the button on his Leica, capturing the exact moment when a bullet enters the soldier’s heart and kills him.

  That photograph—The Falling Soldier—will become the most famous war photograph in history. It will come to symbolize not just the Spanish Civil War but all war and its terrible human cost. (For the controversy surrounding The Falling Soldier, see Appendix A.)

  BY LATE SEPTEMBER, Capa and Taro are back in Paris, awaiting new assignments in Spain. That fall there is another big change: the Soviet Union has agreed to send arms to the Spanish government.

  The war may be turning.

  And Capa is on his way to being famous.

  Capa’s September 1936 photo, The Falling Soldier, is one of the most famous ever taken.

  In this Vu cover, Alexander Libermanuses the swastika and Germanic type to echo the mechanical rigidity of the soldiers. The rising clash of Left and Right could be felt throughout Europe, whether in violent demonstrations, hotly contested elections, or actual combat.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  INTERLUDE: "THE ARTIST MUST TAKE SIDES"

  WHAT IS TRUTH IN WAR? What obligation does a journalist or a photographer have to tell both sides?

  In the six weeks that Capa and Taro spend in Spain, they witness a discour-aging and lopsided struggle. They return to Toledo, where they watch the Alcázar finally liberated by Franco—a humiliating defeat for the Republic. In fight after fight, the government forces are losing badly. The heroic victories the couple imagine they are about to see are a mirage, never found.

  Why do Capa and Taro keep trying to find a government victory? Why do losing battles in a dusty land matter so much? The war in Spain has never been just about Spain. It is about the world. It is about the uneasy balance of powers in Europe and the sense that an ultimate war, a clash of forces on an unimaginable scale, is looming. Capa and Taro know this; that is why they try over and over again to send images back to publications that will tell the government side of the story. For them, their photographs, their cameras, are weapons in the fight against fascism. They are trying to persuade the world to care, to wake up, to see what is occurring in this land.

  To Capa, Taro, and so many who see the dangers looming in Europe, the war in Spain is the one chance, the last chance, to stop the growth of fascism. Just look at Franco’s allies.

  In July, shortly after Franco and other generals staged the military rebellion, an emissary raced to Germany to make the case to Hitler that the rebels desperately needed help—especially equipment and planes. To their surprise, the dictator quickly agreed, even increasing the number of available planes. “The Strait of Gibraltar can’t turn red,” Hitler declared, meaning he would not allow Spain to turn communist.

  There are many calculations behind Hitler’s support of Franco. One is ideology—after all, Franco is another fascist. But Hitler cares little about how Spain itself is governed. Rather, he knows that his real, dangerous, and likely future enemy is the Soviet Union. The two nations are equally bent on world domination. He will not allow a pro-Soviet government to control access to the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. And finally, the deadliest and most frightening reason: this small war is a chance to test Germany’s military equipment. Hitler has been secretly building up his armed forces. Spain gives him a place to train men under fire and to try out his weapons and tactics. Spain will be a bloody practice field for the new technology of war.

  At first, Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union was focused on playing his cards in Spain carefully—with an eye to a future war. In theory, the Soviets should support the Republic with its Popular Front government, but in practice, they are hesitant. The last thing they want to do is start an open fight with Germany until the right time. So the Soviet dictator does not lend his support right away.

  Then there are the liberal democracies—England, France, and the United States. In the beginning, Léon Blum, France’s newly elected prime minister, seemed inclined to support Spain. After all, his government had been brought in on the swell of the Popular Front. Shouldn’t the French join hands across the border to support another Popular Front government in Spain? But Blum is under pressure within France—the Right does not want to see Spain go “red.” Conscious of his own fragile position, Blum begins to have second thoughts. This hesitation is only further amplified when England makes clear that meddling in Spain’s affairs is not a good idea.

  In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt is facing his first reelection and is preoccupied with pulling the country out of the Depression. The last thing he wants is to entangle America in distant conflicts overseas. The fact that the American Catholic Church supports Franco also ties his hands. Roosevelt needs Catholic votes to win the election.

  Mussolini’s eager embrace of combat caused Vu to ask the prescient question: What would happen if Italy and England went to war?

  So the large powers of Europe and America have fallen into a kind of nervous hands-off, wait-and-see game. In early September, representatives of twenty-seven countries meet to form the Non-Intervention Committee. The nations agree to stay out o
f Spain and to monitor any violations of those who might be sending arms or help across the border.

  This poster proudly links Franco with Hitler, Mussolini, and Portugal’s leader, António de Oliveira Salazar. Precisely because of the close alliance of these leaders, many saw Spain and the defense of the Republic as the battle line between evil and idealism.

  The nonintervention pact is a cruel farce. Anyone with eyes can see that German planes, equipment, and guns are already making their way to Franco’s troops as he prepares for a full-on assault of Madrid. Benito Mussolini, the fascist ruler of Italy, does not want to be left out and also wants to test his equipment. He soon joins in the not-so-secret smuggling. Yet no matter what evidence is brought to the Non-Intervention Com-mittee, its members refuse to take notice.

  Once the fascists tip their hand, Stalin realizes he cannot wait on the sidelines. He will support the Spanish government—but at a price. What can struggling, divided Spain offer to the Soviets? The gleaming gold and silver from the Aztecs and Inca fill the country’s treasury. Mounds of doubloons from Spain’s lost empire remain. The Soviets offer to guard Spain’s gold from the military rebels.