by Desconhecido
While Taro is streaking ahead of the other journalists to photograph the action in Brunete, Capa is back in Paris. The International Exposition is in full swing. At the exposition each nation has a pavilion displaying its artistic accomplishments and technological prowess. The exposition is a triumph of design. Architects and designers come from all over to see the sleek, modern spaces, the art, the displays of airplanes and inventions. But the exposition also captures the politics of the time.
In the long plaza, on either side of the Eiffel Tower, two buildings face off: the German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, features a tower that resembles a Greek temple, its columns stretched long and tall, its Nazi flags flying crisply. Across the way stands the Soviet pavilion, made of massive slabs and topped by a bronze man and woman clasping a sickle and hammer, a proclamation of the Soviet revolution. This is the architecture of empire, meant to be triumphant, assertive, domineering. Nothing better expresses the state of the world as it hovers between two aggressive, ambitious, and deadly powers.
Dwarfed, and just recently completed, is the modest Spanish pavilion, which was not ready in time for the lavish opening of the exposition in May. The Spanish pavilion is designed to show the horrors of the war alongside the dignity and cultural traditions of the Spanish people, in all of their regional varieties. It’s as if the displays are saying, See what you are destroying by doing nothing? See what we must defend?
Unlike the other pavilions, which are upbeat celebrations of technology, the main story in the Spanish pavilion is told through photo murals that flow from wall to wall like a film. The giant murals made with photos by Capa, Taro, and Chim have been printed “with a mop on photographic paper spread on the floor,” according to renowned photo printer Pierre Gassmann. The pictures are of war, but they also show the heroics of the Spanish people such as the farmer who now is part of a collective. Once again photographs are being used to promote the cause of the government. The modest architecture of the building, its clean and simple lines, is also a kind of assertion: the quiet strength of a country against these huge, clashing ideologies and belligerent powers.
Taken inside the Spanish pavilion, this photo gives a sense of the power of Picasso’s mural. The sculpture in front is by the American artist Alexander Calder, who supported the Republic.
In his studio in Paris, Pablo Picasso has been furiously painting a mural to commemorate the bombing of Guernica. His tortured images now dominate the pavilion as Guernica stretches across a wall and is painted in black, white, and gray, like a photograph or an old piece of newspaper. The painting is a scream, a collage of hurt and outrage. Figures twist and cry; a horse brays. Picasso has poured his rage into this work, which is an enduring symbol of antiwar, antifascist protest.
Capa comes to the exposition, but his mind is on another part of the world. Japan—yet another fascist nation—is fighting in China. Capa approaches Life magazine for an assignment. Though he doesn’t get a firm commitment, he’s determined that he and Taro will get on a boat to shoot the next exciting world story. As he sees it, they are now both established photojournalists. He is not as wedded to Spain anymore. He is wedded to their life together, traveling, covering the world’s next great drama.
Chim’s portrait of Picasso in his studio, standing in front of Guernica, his masterful mural.
BATTLE OF BRUNETE
Taro is in a very different place—she’s sealed into this conflict. She’s not just an experienced correspondent; she’s the one who has scooped them all.
Every day Taro heads to the front, often with Ted Allan in tow, to cover the “terrible battle under a burning July sun.” The other residents at the Alianza are amazed at the petite young woman, dressed in her overalls and canvas shoes, who hauls the heavy movie camera and sets off for the dusty, hot village. She will do anything to get there. And her photographs are among her strongest: exhausted soldiers resting in the dry scrub grass, soldiers hurrying to carry boxes of supplies, tanks rumbling down the narrow streets of Brunete.
Though Capa took this shot in Córdoba in 1936, it shows Taro’s almost ecstatic expression as she crouches next to a soldier under fire. Perhaps this is similar to how she felt in Brunete.
Nights she sits in the Hotel Gran Vía restaurant, huddled with other journalists. Jay Allen spots her “in an alcove in a corner with a crowd of French correspondents. Someone pointed her out and told me what I knew: how she went into the front, into action, advanced with the men to get those astonishing pictures. And how the Republican command valued her presence at the front . . . because when the men saw her—she looked a child although she was twenty-five—they felt that things couldn’t be as bad as all that.”
Taro records soldiers hurrying to bring supplies and hold the line in the fighting near Brunete.
On one such evening, July 9, Taro muses to British correspondent Claud Cockburn, “When one isn’t in Madrid, one thinks and talks so much about the atmosphere of the place, the nobility of it, the high level of life here, that one begins to have the feeling perhaps one is making it all up, that it is just an affectation. And then as soon as one comes back, one sees that, as a matter of fact, it is all quite true.”
A week later, the battle has ground to a standstill. The government troops are short of everything—medical supplies, food, ammunition. The field telephone lines have melted in the scorching heat. Discipline breaks down. The fighting pauses as the government forces decide to regroup.
The lull in action also allows Taro to pause. Her mind turns to Capa, Paris, and the future. She gets a plane ticket to join him in Paris for July 14—another Bastille Day.
PARIS
It is hard to believe that nearly one year ago, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Capa and Taro had little then but their new names, their hope, their brash ambitions. Now they have the careers they want. The newsstands are stuffed with their photographs. On many days, Taro can see her pictures in magazines; she has found her place as a photographer in her own right.
On Bastille Day, the anniversary celebration of the French Revolution, Regards runs a special issue on Spain, featuring essays and photos from Capa, Taro, and Chim. Life magazine commemorates the anniversary with the headline DEATH IN SPAIN: THE CIVIL WAR HAS TAKEN 500,000 LIVES. Capa’s photograph The Falling Soldier is featured in a huge spread. The war has changed the three photographers. Yes, they are still young. But they have grown up. They have reputations, a following, stature. They have tried to make the world see as they do.
This stamp issued by the Republic commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution (see page 107). The statue appeared at the Soviet pavilion in Paris. Posters, stamps, banners, mottos—the revolution surrounded you, which could be either inspiring or oppressive, depending on your point of view.
On July 14 at least a million people surge into the streets of Paris for the holiday, many of them protesting the situation in Spain. Capa and Taro join another couple, an American journalist who will soon join the Spanish fight and a young Jewish woman from Austria. The two couples dance in a tiny square in the steep, narrow streets of Montmarte, below the towering Sacré Coeur basilica atop the hill.
In 1936 Capa recorded Parisians dancing for Bastille Day. A year later, the streets were still festive, but Spain was being torn apart and a larger war seemed ever more likely.
We can imagine these two, just as we did when they were in the Café du Dome the prior spring, now linking arms in the warm night. Taro is far away from the heat and dust-choked roads of Brunete. She is in the glow of her beauty and youth, her invincibility, the rightness of who she and Capa are at this moment, this time. Her mood is lighter than ever, for she has heard the good news that her family, residing in Yugoslavia, has applied for a visa to Palestine. She and Capa are grabbing life even as they know the danger lurking at the edges. The young Austrian woman whose boyfriend is about to leave to fight in Spain “guessed that Death danced with us . . . but we tried not
to think about it.”
As their figures melt in and out of the shadows, swapping partners in a traditional square dance, they can probably glimpse the lit-up fountains of the exposition, the German and Soviet pavilions rising like massive white tablets. The smaller, low-lying Spanish pavilion is not visible.
For Capa, Spain is dimming as his sole focus. He is growing more ambitious, concentrating on getting to China, taking the next chance, the next plunge. China is brand-new territory for him and Taro, a chance to take a long sea voyage to another continent on the other side of the world.
Even as Capa plans for the next act in his life, in their lives, Taro can’t get Spain out of her mind, nor can she pull herself away from Brunete. She flings herself into this crucial conflict and the loyalist victory she is sure is imminent. This is hers. And yet, perhaps because of her attachment to Capa, perhaps because she senses she does indeed need to move on to the next story, the next phase of their life, she agrees to go to China. First, though, she must finish her work in Brunete.
Perhaps she reaches an arm out, leans in close. Just ten days, she tells him, and then she’ll be back.
Fifty thousand Republican soldiers were engaged in an effort to split the rebel lines near Brunete, fighting in over one-hundred-degree heat. Taro was stationed by the roadside as tanks rumbled through the area. All of the images from Brunete were taken by Taro during those late-July days.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ONE MORE DAY, ONE MORE SHOT
SECOND HALF OF JULY 1937
IN MID-JULY TARO RETURNS to the majestic brick building of the Alianza with its lush and spacious garden. Not far away, in the parched landscape of Brunete, the battle has turned into a standoff that is slowly destroying both sides. Though Franco’s forces were initially caught by surprise, by July 18 they have launched a counterattack with a new German aircraft, the Messerschmitt Bf 109. “The fascists brought their airplanes from the northern front to bombard and strafe incessantly. Day and night they had something for us, never letting us sleep or rest,” writes Aleksander Szurek. Many gains made by the government are swiftly lost; now the loyalist forces concentrate on digging trenches and trying to hold on.
There are some who believe the Battle of Brunete is turning into a mistake. The government is desperate to achieve one grand victory against the rebels, but the International Brigades, especially, are exhausted. All the volunteers have been sent from one front to another without rest, and now they are entrenched on the blistering-hot plains of Castile, where the temperatures soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
“We ran in advances where we could see fascists fleeing before us,” reported David McKelvy White, an American volunteer in Brunete.
Taro is like a woman possessed. Determined to capture the story, she rises early at the Alianza and heads out, lugging the heavy movie camera, her tripod pockmarked with bullet holes. She buys flowers for the censor in order to get a ride and access to the front; she pushes and persuades. Her photographs from Brunete are powerful, action-filled. They show the lengths to which she’s willing to go to get her shots.
The battle grinds on in the desolate, sun-baked fields. Brunete and its neighbors lie in a flat, dry valley rimmed by blue-tinged hills. The residents and troops on the ground are open targets for aerial bombing by both government and fascist planes. Old churches, family homes, and cobbled streets are being pummeled, crushed to dust. Back and forth, the gains of each side boomerang. One day is good for the loyalists; the next they lose what they’ve won. Oliver Law, an African American captain in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, takes command of his men. This is the first time in all of American history that white soldiers have been led by a black officer. But in leading the charge against the rebels on Mosquito Ridge, Law is mortally wounded. (For the controversy over the death of Oliver Law, see Appendix B.)
Taro’s grainy image of the damaged church tower in Brunete evokes the heat and dust of the battle.
At night, a gloomy Arturo Barea, who runs the censor office in Madrid, stands on a high floor from which he can see the fighting in the distance. “There, behind the dark, flashing cloud, Brunete was being killed by clanking tanks and screaming bombs: its mud houses crumbled in dust, the mire of its pond spattered, its dry earth plowed up by shells and sown with blood. It seemed to me a symbol of our war: the forlorn village making history by being destroyed in a clash between those who kept all the Brunetes of my country arid, dry, dusty, and poor . . . and the others who dreamed of transforming the dust-gray villages of Castile, of all of Spain, into homesteads of free . . . men.”
Taro photographs in the trenches alongside the young men. As David McKelvy White describes, “We saw tough guys crack up and babble like babies, wild-eyed. We saw boys grow to resolute maturity in a day.”
Taro seems to have fused with the cause. Like so many of her generation, her background, this is the moment of fight, of sheer survival. Her family is waiting anxiously to see if they will be able to immigrate to Palestine, while the Nazi invasion of Europe seems ever more imminent. Her mother has recently passed away. Taro has nothing to lose. She is driving herself harder and harder each day on one of her most dangerous assignments without Capa by her side.
In the past year, Capa and Taro have learned from each other. They camped together in Segovia, following a unit. They were each other’s second eye, partners. Before, she was the one who carefully framed her shots. Impatient Capa, the daredevil, simply plunged. But in these past few months, left on her own, Taro has developed her own skill at photographing violence and war. Now she, too, goes into the action fearlessly. As the forces battle at Brunete, she is becoming like Capa, rushing into the scene.
One day late in July, she is crouching in a foxhole with the journalist Claud Cockburn as the Messerschmitts let loose their bombs, the ground shuddering around them. They are sure they are going to die.
Suddenly, Taro swivels up and starts shooting pictures of the planes. “If we ever do get out of this,” she jokes, “at least we’ll have something to show the Non-Intervention Committee.” Another time a truck is hit and goes up in flames. Taro rushes toward the truck, even as the smoke and heat blur across her lens.
Taro’s photographs are wholly different from any she has taken before: they are eerie, overexposed, shaky, blurred. The artful young woman, who understands fashion and appearance, is gone. She has shed her sense of framing and care. She is all skin and bone, risk and intensity. She is inside the blur of action, shooting like a combatant. There’s a bareness to her work now. Click, click—a burning truck. Click—shells raining down on a trench. Point the lens up: click—bombers in the sky.
Taro continues photographing as the battle intensifies with house-to-house fighting, aerial bombardment, and constant artillery strikes.
Taro is there in the trenches alongside the men as they lean into their sandbags and aim their rifles. She jogs along as a wounded man is carried on a stretcher; she’s behind a company of soldiers as they surge up a dry, stubbled field, rifles in hand. And she’s with them in the small moments of rest—even the man holding a rifle swivels around to grin at her. In that smile perhaps she sees a sign: in this moment they are safe. As she remarks several times to a French journalist, her desire to always be on the front lines is “really the only way to understand and do some good.”
And maybe she is right—maybe she is a charm for the troops.
PARIS
In Paris, Capa learns that Life magazine has agreed to send them to China. Their joint reputation helped, but the breakthrough came when Capa explained they would accompany the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. He considers racing off to Madrid; instead, he sends a telegram and goes to celebrate with his friends in the bars around Montparnasse.
Back at the Alianza, Taro excitedly tells all her journalist friends that she’s going to China. She has just one more day before she packs it all in and heads back to Paris.
Just one more day, she tells herself. And then I will be done
.
BATTLE OF BRUNETE
This is the image Ted Allan will always remember of the morning of July 25: Gerda Taro, dressed in overalls, waiting impatiently in front of a car she has commissioned to take them to the front. “I must get some good pictures to take to Paris,” she tells him. “If they are still fighting near Brunete it will be my chance to get some action pictures.”
The sun is already hot and strong, and it is risky for the two of them to drive to Brunete. The fascists are advancing. Allan does not want to go, but he reluctantly agrees. He promised Capa, after all, to keep an eye on Taro. And Taro has been flirting with him for weeks—he can’t refuse her!
“Let’s not go too close,” Allan begs as they roar down the dusty roads.
“How do you want me to take pictures?” she teases. “Long distance?”
“That’s an idea.”
She eyes him. “Are you frightened?”
“Yes. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she laughs.
And so they push on, Taro admitting—and shrugging off—fear in words that sound just like Capa’s.
When General Walter, tall and imposing, his head shaved because of the sweltering heat, emerges from his makeshift headquarters, he is livid. “Of all the days to come! You must go immediately!” he yells.
In the waves of heat, Taro photographs a bombed supply vehicle as it bursts into flames.
The situation is dangerous and confused: Franco’s troops have broken through the lines and recaptured the village. The loyalist units are in the midst of trying to repel them. Journalists are forbidden in the fighting zone. Yet Taro insists—this is her very last day, her very last chance to get pictures. “I’m going to Paris tomorrow,” she begs.