by Desconhecido
For Capa, the defense of Madrid is his signal—he must get back to Spain, right away. So he gets an assignment from Regards, the same publication that has Chim on salary.
Capa must have been standing right next to this gunner as he aimed through a window slot in Madrid.
This time, Capa is without Taro, who has gone to Italy for a few weeks to meet up with old Leipzig friends. This seemingly small and short separation will have deep repercussions for Capa—and for their relationship. It is a decision Taro will come to regret. Capa will get his first real taste of war. And she will be left behind.
NOVEMBER 18, when Capa sets foot in Madrid, has been a particularly devastating time of bombing and shelling. The day before, Franco and his men sent two thousand bombs an hour whizzing into the city, smashing anything that stood. Capa makes his way through the shattered streets, past the pockets of still-raging fires, and reaches his room at the Hotel Florida. This hotel is where all foreign journalists gather and where writers, many of them famous, mill around, drinking whatever liquor can be found and swapping tips and stories. Once a grand ten-story building with a soaring glass atrium, “now it had a stripped appearance, with its bleak stuffed chairs abandoned in the lobby,” writes American radical Josephine Herbst. “There was a lift [elevator], but to save the electricity it didn’t run.”
Here Capa meets Gustav Regler, a handsome German communist writer who now works for the Soviets in Spain. Regler is immediately drawn to the lively young man with a camera slung around his neck, and brings him to his commander, a Hungarian, General Pavol Lukács, who is in a nearby suburb plotting his next steps. The men pull up in a French car “in a halo of blue smoke, its windshield shattered, mudguards twisted, radiator dented.”
When Capa explains that he is a photojournalist for a French leftist magazine and would like a guide to a battle, the irritated General Lukács retorts, “Maybe he’d like me to take him there on horseback, too? Get him out of here! If he persists, he’s going to get himself pistol-whipped!”
But Capa does not leave, and so the general gives him a skeptical once-over, asking, “What do you really want?”
“I want to see the enemy,” Capa replies.
“We haven’t found him yet,” Regler admits.
Still suspicious, Lukács draws Regler aside and whispers, “How do we know he isn’t a spy?” At which point Capa, who senses that the two men are talking about him, says in Hungarian, “Are you discussing my reliability?” He thrusts his camera toward the general. “Here is my passport. One day I will be among the greats.”
And so Capa, the confident charmer, the gambler, finally makes his way to his first real action.
Capa took this photo of soldiers shooting through holes in a sandbag barrier from a few paces behind them.
ON THE LEFT BANK of the Manzanares River, the scrub grass is stiff with frost. Capa, Regler, and an officer peer across the water, trying to make out the enemy’s position. The three are in the northwest corner of the city, in a group of farm buildings belonging to the agricultural school in University City. Franco’s troops have already crossed the river on footbridges, stationed themselves in the School of Architecture, and are now in a large manor, the Palacio de la Moncloa. This stretch of campus is no-man’s-land. Somewhere in these abandoned horse stables and granaries, the invisible enemy lies in wait. Capa follows the men into rooms fortified with sandbags, then through an old slaughterhouse, where the soldiers tilt their rifles through broken patches in the wall.
A scout arrives to tell them that Moroccans are on the top floor of a barn, shooting through holes in the floor and killing government soldiers. Suddenly a burst of shelling breaks out, and the three men dive to the ground. Bullets whistle and screech overhead. “You’ve got me trapped by the Moors!” Capa shouts, half-frightened, half-joking to Regler.
When the shooting stops and the three men get up, a shaken Capa asks to pause, having soiled his pants. “My intestines were not so brave as my camera,” he jokes.
THE CRUEL SKY
Capa spends the next couple of weeks covering the fighting in University City. He takes moody, smoky shots in old medical school classrooms, where barricades have been constructed out of suitcases and stacks of textbooks. It’s as if the battle in University City were a war for knowledge itself: laboratories are described by one reporter as having “delicate scientific instruments crushed under fallen bricks, . . . notebooks and specimens strewn among shattered furniture, microscope slides on broken floors, the splintered glass starred like crazy paving.”
Capa also provides a glimpse of the boredom and waiting that so characterizes war: men playing cards, writing letters, camping out, and eating in an old physics laboratory. Many of the soldiers are from the International Brigades, and inside the old classrooms, men of all different nationalities break stale bread together, huddle in the chilly outposts, and shout orders in a mix of languages.
The opposing forces were so close that Republican soldiers shot through holes in a wall at enemy forces just on the other side of the plaster.
Two men rest in what had once been a science lab.
As November turns icy cold, and a dirty fog envelops the city, fighting around University City intensifies.House to house, floor to floor, the men clash, battling at times for a full twenty-four hours a day. Franco’s troops capture more buildings. Government losses are heavy—beloved anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti, who brought three thousand troops from Aragon, is shot and killed. And yet the rebels do not break through the front lines; the city has not fallen to the fascist assault.
Over the next few weeks, Capa photographs battle scenes and the city of Madrid itself, along with its resident Madrileños. Nightly they huddle, listening to buildings “quiver,” watching the electricity blink on and off. Outside the windows covered in blackout curtains come the hiss and boom of explosions and ghoulish shadows cast on the streets and canyons of walls. Flimsy buildings, largely in the poorer areas, collapse like children’s toy houses. Never has a city been subjected to such brutal bombing. These bombardments are meant not only to destroy houses but to beat down the spirit of the people in Madrid.
The sky, the terrible and cruel sky, is raining bombs as Franco maintains his aerial assault. In Capa’s photos, we see so many faces, tipped upward, hearing the low hum of motors, scanning for the telltale signs of airplanes. We see, too, families crouched and huddled on the cold concrete floors of subway stations, where they have fled for shelter, with pots, bottles, and blankets gathered around them. The ground overhead thuds and booms; the children laugh and play. We see the exposed innards of buildings, a lone iron bed frame under a wrecked roof.
When Capa was not with the soldiers during the November–December fighting in Madrid, he recorded the human consequences of war. Here, a family finds refuge in a subway station.
Anyone who can be spared from the fighting leaves Madrid. Every day fifteen thousand women and children are evacuated from the city. A proud capital has become an endless caravan of refugees, standing beside their bedding or striding away with several chairs slung over a shoulder.
Capa—along with Chim and eventually Taro—is inventing a new visual lan-guage, one that shows what it is to lose everything, to be in flight, to be a refugee. One day you are eating soup at your table; the next you are dragging a rolled-up mattress and a few belongings down a street, homeless. Capa and the others are drawn to these images, these stories. While Capa photographs destruction in the making, Chim shows where the refugees flee to—a hastily assembled camp in the stony hills of Montjuïc, near Barcelona. There thousands try to continue some semblance of normality. Chim photographs them lovingly: a frightened girl with a satin bow in her hair sits tentatively on her metal bed, a doll on each knee; mothers pin laundry in the warm sun; a young woman pens a letter atop her suitcase.
While Capa was photographing how bombs turned women and children out of their homes, Chim captured where many of them wound up: in a refugee center outs
ide of Barcelona. Here, a girl holds two dolls whose eyes seem as watchful and concerned as hers.
This is what Capa, Taro, and Chim are too: refugees, exiles, living on their wits, with no real home. Capa does not even have a passport or official papers anymore—he is not Hungarian, not German, not French—just a man with a camera in the midst of a war. That rootless condition is rapidly becoming the condition of thousands in Spain. It’s as if these photographs are a warning: millions will be driven from their homes across the whole continent of Europe if the world does not do something now.
This is what war looks like, his photographs seem to say. This is what happens when we leave Spain to be pummeled by the fascists.
FRANCO’S AERIAL BOMBING—the worst in the war—does not bring Madrid to its knees. In fact, the bombing only strengthens the citizens’ resolve. The photographs that Capa sends back show the dignified way that ordinary Madrileños are coping: lining up to donate blood, making homes in the metro stations. His images broadcast the message that maybe, just maybe, the war might be won by the government. Determination and courage may hold against terror. Like the slogan on banners that hang across the streets of the capital—NO PASARÁN—Franco’s men will not pass, will not enter, will not win. Madrileños will not succumb.
Capa shows Madrid after the bombing: coming up for air, soldiers emerge from their dugouts.
Children play in front of a wall battered and gouged by bullets and shells.
Again and again La Pasionaria, the intense Spanish communist orator, uses the radio to exhort the people of Madrid to hold fast. Tiny, angular, with a severe face, wearing widow’s black, she visits the soldiers in University City. Over the radio she urges women, “It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward.”
It is a terrible winter. The defenders of Madrid walk “side by side, arm in arm, with Death,” as the Republic’s press officer writes. But it is a glorious winter. Despite nightly air raids, fires that rage through working-class neighborhoods, and thirty thousand soldiers dead—fifteen thousand on each side—Franco fails. Madrid stands.
Capa’s photos tell the story.
Even in wintry, bombed-out Madrid-under-siege, soldiers find a way to relax.
CAPA’S PHOTOGRAPHS create a sensation back in Paris. Regards devotes page after page to his work, with a big banner headline that reads, THE CRUCIFIED CAPITAL: THE PRODIGIOUS PHOTOS OF CAPA, OUR SPECIAL ENVOY TO MADRID. His work is also featured in German and British magazines. Capa is no longer the scruffy Hungarian with a made-up name. He’s a celebrity.
Taro returns to Paris to find her boyfriend’s photos plastered across all the important magazines. What does she make of Capa’s newfound reputation?
On one level, Taro is thrilled. After all, isn’t this what they had worked so hard to achieve? All those nights in their bare one-room apartment, where they pored over photos, critiqued and argued over images; where she wrote his captions and groomed him to present himself to editors; where they plotted and planned and invented new names? They did all that together. Capa is now a well-known photographer who has joined the ranks of professionals, side by side with Chim. His talent is obvious to everyone.
Although this Regards spread is about the International Brigades, it also proudly announces that the images within were taken by Capa.
Yet Taro immediately understands, on a deeper level, that she missed her chance. The Capa she helped invent has eclipsed her. She must get back to Spain to make up for lost time, since she has yet to establish herself in photography. For Taro, it is becoming a point of honor and identity to make sure that her byline appears under her pictures. She confesses to her friend Ruth Cerf that she’s “insulted” by not having her name in print. Clearly frustration is brewing within her. Perhaps this is why she tells Capa that she needs to receive a credit for her own photos.
Throughout the winter, Taro and Capa bide their time, seeking out the next exciting opportunity. Finally, they get their chance, with a joint assignment in January to go to the coast of Málaga to capture the rising conflict there.
This Regards cover is devoted to the brutal destruction of Madrid, as captured by Capa. He has become a star.
Vu’s covers experimented with angles and combined pictures to create striking images. This issue on the possible end of civilization could be a film poster or on the jacket of a modern dystopian novel.
CHAPTER SEVEN
INTERLUDE: ACTION ON THE PAGE
“CAPA CHANGED PHOTOGRAPHY,” his friend and a fellow photographer Gisèle Freund would say. “He created a demand for action. He got editors used to photos taken close up to frontline action.” Energy, dynamism—still photos that read with the pace of a movie—this is exactly what the magazine editors want.
Life is speeding up—not only through technologies such as cars, airplanes, movies, radios, and telephones, but in the rush of ideas and clash of mass movements. Movie theaters are filled with eager viewers. Before each showing comes a news-reel giving a fast-moving pageant of wars, protests, marching troops, larger-than-life dictators mesmerizing cheering crowds, as well as the latest clips of royalty, movie stars, and sports heroes. Everyone wants action images that bring the world right to them. Just in time for the civil war in Spain, magazine editors have figured out how to make their photo-filled pages as powerful, lively, and direct as a newsreel.
A magazine is a set of blank pages until images and text fill them. Where should the images go? There can be one picture per page, marching through the magazine like fence posts. But why? What if you lay pictures out across two facing pages, called a spread? What if you angle photos from the top of one page to the bottom of the next page, or make one giant image, like a movie close-up, while a sequence of others run next to it like a newsreel? Capa understood what the editors were looking for and how they might use the images he was sending to them.
Alexander Liberman’s design captured the electric power of radio to ignore distance and beam stories across the air.
Capa had an “automatic sense of the proper continuity for a picture story,” photographer Cartier-Bresson observes. Photos are no longer illustrations, showing in a picture what a writer describes in words. Now they unfold one after the other as stories—photo essays—guiding the eye across pages, spreads, into the heart of war.
The picture editors have learned from the experimental Russian painters and graphic designers called the constructivists. Those artists saw factories as churches, machines as sculptures, radio towers as the new temples. Straight lines replaced the familiar curves of the human body. To make viewers feel the change, the triumph of the new, constructivists treated images not as static portraits but rather as objects themselves. They would take pictures apart, rearrange them, and put them back together using slanted angles. The new tempo and disruption of modern life broke images apart and splattered them across pages.
Constructivism flourished in the early days of the Russian Revolution, before Stalin decided that workers needed clear portraits of heroic workers. In Hungary, where Capa came from, avant-garde photography was also in vogue, with objects and scenes shot from disorienting angles. In Paris, another artistic movement inspired the editors: cubism. The cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque realized that there was no point in treating a painting as a fake window that fools your eye into thinking you are seeing a person, a flower, a cat. Photos could do that perfectly well. No, a painting is flat lines on flat paper. Cubists might show one image seen from many angles at once, emphasizing that you see only two dimensions. They might paint a guitar by layering a drawing on top of a newspaper, creating a collage in which the actual strings and shape of the instrument are barely visible. Inspired by these radical artists, magazine editors position photos in jarring juxtapositions. Readers experience both attention-grabbing disruption and an enticing flow of storytelling pictures.
Capa, Taro, and Chim all kept contact notebooks, where they pasted their prints. They used them to record the
shots they had taken and sometimes to show editors potential stories. Chim often rigorously edited his notebooks, taking out the images he did not think were good or relevant.
Vu celebrates “the joy of movement” in this June 1937 spread. Motion is everywhere—not in static photos of people at play but in the flow of those images, which takes the eye on a roller-coaster ride, swinging up and back and flipping upside down.
Often a spread will feature large scene-setting photos of, for example, bombed-out buildings. Set in front of the buildings would be images of people, the refugees made homeless by the bombs. The page tells two stories—the physical damage and the human cost. These spreads are dynamic; they leap off the page. And they are hugely popular.
With this spread, Regards tells the story of a Catholic Mass held in the open air in the Basque region of Spain. The sequence of images is as important as any single shot—making the spread a kind of newsreel. In this region, the church was allied with the Republic, while in the rest of Spain, the church supported the rebels.
Chim took this picture of a mother nursing her baby while listening to the same 1936 land-reform speech that excited the crowd in the Popular Front image on page 29.
In this new world of photo news magazines, some images are manipulated for effect—and are not exact reporting. Capa’s images of refugees fleeing Cerro Muriano are used in a story on Málaga, for instance. The composite images are compiled by the magazine editors, arranged for emotional and aesthetic impact. One of the most famous shots was taken by Chim in the spring of 1936. He captured a crowd staring up at the sky. In the very center is a mother whose baby is nursing at her breast while she squints upward, her face half lit with sunlight. The image was used on the cover of Madrid, a leftist publication about the defense of the city. On that cover, the photo of the mother is cropped to show her in the bottom left corner, a huge German bomb with a swastika raining down the right, while a squadron of black airplanes take off against the sky.