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

by Desconhecido

  “No!” Furious, Walter adds to Allan, “Take her away from here! Go immediately! In five minutes there will be hell.”

  Allan wants to leave, but Taro refuses. This is the Taro who has grown accustomed to dashing out into the open even as snipers pick out their targets, the Taro who crouches, elated, next to a soldier as shells crash around her, a look of ecstasy on her face. She’s caught the adrenaline, the rush, the need to get one more.

  Suddenly, it’s too late: overhead comes the familiar, low buzzing sound of approaching aircraft—the dreaded Messerschmitts—“fast, ugly arrow-heads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. . . . They move like mechanized doom.”

  Taro seizes Allan’s arm and they fling themselves into a small foxhole in a nearby trench. “Have you ever been under fire?” she shouts to him. He shakes his head—not like this.

  He will never forget that day: the ground explodes with falling bombs. Black clouds billow; clumps of dirt fling up into their mouths. From all sides, they are hammered. Still Taro manages to stand, pulls the movie camera to her eye, and films. After the bombing runs come the gunners, strafing low to the ground. Taro changes to her Leica. She takes “pictures of the dust and white smoke which came from the shells . . . picture after picture.” Suddenly a squadron swings straight toward them—they must have seen Taro’s camera glinting in the sun. The lead plane fires. Taro calmly keeps shooting.

  The assault pounds on and on. Geysers of dirt spurt up from the ground. Men are blown apart just feet from their foxhole. Ahead they can just make out soldiers scrambling up out of their trench and trying to make a run for it.

  Taro climbs out, waving her arms, telling the frightened soldiers not to run. Then she leaps back into their foxhole. Finally the shadows of the planes sweep past on the broken earth. The fields grow still. She is out of film now.

  Taro and Allan wipe themselves off and stand. Grimy, streaked in dirt and mud, they start walking back along the road toward Villanueva de la Cañada, a village near Brunete. Everywhere is chaos—cars, trucks, soldiers stumbling in different directions, wounded strewn on the ground. This seems to be a retreat, but in the confusion, it’s hard to know what’s going on. They hitch a ride on top of a tank and make their way to the first-aid post in the village. Once there, they spot General Walter’s big black car and hail it, hoping for a lift part of the way back to Madrid.

  Inside, though, are wounded men stretched out on the backseat. “Salud,” Taro greets everyone and hands her cameras into the car, then hops on the running board, with Allan doing the same behind her. As the car speeds off, she cares more about the cameras than she does her own safety. “Tonight we’ll have a farewell party in Madrid,” she shouts to Allan. “I’ve bought some champagne.”

  All of a sudden German planes appear like a swarm of black crows on the horizon. The driver clutches his wheel and shrinks down in his seat, unable to see. Out of nowhere, a loyalist tank swerves toward them, swiping the general’s car. Allan is flung into the air, landing in a ditch. He goes numb.

  And Gerda—lightweight, petite Gerda—is knocked off the car to the ground. An instant later, the tank roars forward. Her torso is crushed under its metal treads.

  Taro keeps shooting, even in total chaos.

  THE DOCTORS TRY THEIR BEST. They take her to a field hospital in El Escorial, a nearby village, where she is given a blood transfusion. A doctor operates on her, without anesthesia, as there was none, and the whole time she clenches down on a cigarette for the unbearable pain. But it is hopeless; they cannot help her. Her insides have been torn irreparably. Gerda keeps asking, “Did someone take care of my cameras? Please. They’re brand new.” A nurse hovers, tries to keep her comfortable. All night the wounded are being brought in.

  Drugged with morphine, Gerda closes her eyes and eases into death.

  PARIS

  The morning of July 27, Capa wakes early—unusual for him. He is anxious. Gerda has not returned nor wired. He tried to reach her at the Alianza the night before; no answer. Now he grabs a copy of l’Humanité, the Communist Party paper, but he does not read it, for he has an appointment at the dentist.

  Walking briskly, the newspaper tucked under his arm, he passes trees flush with summer green. It is in the waiting room that he reads the news on page three: A FRENCH JOURNALIST, MLLE. TAROT IS REPORTED TO HAVE BEEN KILLED IN THE COURSE OF A BATTLE, NEAR BRUNETE. He runs back to the apartment and finally reaches his editor at Ce Soir. It’s true, the editor tells him. Gerda has been killed. Overcome, Capa collapses.

  His friends bring him sandwiches and fruit and try to comfort him, but Capa is inconsolable, wild with sorrow.

  Taro’s death is announced to the world.

  This 1936 photo by Capa is posed—Taro is the woman leaning on the grave. It is not about Taro’s death, but it is often used to mark the event.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A MARTYR IS BORN

  LATE JULY–AUGUST 1937

  WHEN THE COFFIN is set down on the cold concrete floor of the Gare d’Austerlitz, a train station in Paris, one hundred people are there to meet it. Ruth Cerf and others must hold Capa up—he can barely walk. He is drawn, pale. Taro’s father and brother are there, newly arrived from Yugoslavia. The grief-stricken father leans on Cerf until he sees the coffin, when he flings his arms around the edges and starts to chant the Jewish prayer for the dead, the kaddish. Hearing this, Capa breaks down.

  Suddenly Taro’s brother swerves around, mad with fury at Capa. He starts to shout that it is all Capa’s fault that his sister is dead. After all, he introduced her to photography; he took her to Spain! Then the brother swings, slugging Capa in the face. Capa does not fight back. He just submits to the beating. He, too, believes that her death his fault; he is eaten up with guilt.

  But there is no room for private grieving.

  Taro’s funeral has become a public spectacle. Already at the Alianza in Madrid her coffin was displayed so that artists, journalists, and soldiers could honor her. Then it was sent off by a guard of honor to Valencia, where there was another viewing, the coffin covered in flowers. Constancia de la Mora, the censor for whom Taro had once left flowers, recalls, “I could not forget Gerda Taro, so young and charming, with her sweet smile and almost childish figure and face.”

  Taro has been turned into Joan of Arc, a martyr to the Popular Front and the Left. Already Ce Soir has run an issue filled with tributes to Taro, along with her and Capa’s photos. Life magazine will run a spread titled THE SPANISH WAR KILLS ITS FIRST WOMAN PHOTOGRAPHER, and soon other magazines all over Europe will cover her death.

  Now Taro fully belongs to the cause. Her coffin stands in the Maison de la Culture, its facade hung with black crepe, while famous people from all over come and pay their respects. More homages pour in—from Ted Allan, from commanders who had met Taro, and other journalists, filling the pages of newspapers. They write of how young she was, how brave she was at the front. The soldiers who knew her have taken her death hard. One of her colleagues says her courage was that of three men. Her legend grows.

  On August 1, Taro’s twenty-seventh birthday, as Chopin’s funeral march is played over loudspeakers, tens of thousands surge into the streets for the procession, heading through the Place de la République—where they had so often gone for other mass demonstrations—to the Père Lachaise Cemetery. The whole way, Capa weeps. “He was just a great boy, crazy with courage and overflowing with life,” the editor at Ce Soir said. “Now war had murdered his youth.”

  CAPA RETURNS TO THE STUDIO, locks himself inside, and drinks for days. A startled Gustav Regler one day spies Capa in the street and is shocked. “It was the middle of the day, and Capa was drunk, standing on the pavement, swaying.” Capa even talks about giving up photography.

  Ce Soir honors Taro in photos and written tributes.

  A card depicts the scene of Taro’s death. She was instantly a heroine and martyr to the Left.

  His friends plead with him, but he is racked w
ith guilt, pain, and grief. “I left her in danger—she would never have died if I’d been there,” Capa would say. “As long as she was with me, she was safe. As long as I was there, she’d do what I did. I would never have let her stand on the running board. That was a reckless thing to do. I would have never allowed it.”

  Is there truth in what Capa says? In a collaboration such as theirs, what happened when the two were apart? How much did they need each other; how much were they separate? On her own in Brunete, had Taro lost some of her balance? Had she deprived herself of the way they complemented each other, kept each other safe?

  Partnership can temper the excesses of each individual. Capa’s irresponsibility, his gambling, was curbed by the forceful and disciplined Taro. But her drive, her ambition and single-mindedness, could blind her to danger. The youthful invincibility she must have felt, dancing in Paris near the Sacré Coeur, may have blurred her judgment. She had started to believe her own myth: la pequeña rubia.

  Those long days, camping out, bearing some of the same conditions as the soldiers, you start to feel you must be one of them. Living with the men is a way of saying, Trust me. Let me into your lives. I am one of you. Let me come in close, because I am willing to risk as you do.

  And yet you are not the same. This is the journalist’s guilt: after a long day on the battlefield, you can leave the wounded and the dead behind, return to the Alianza, clean up, and soak in a bath. Sharing every day with soldiers, some of them heartbreakingly young, who willingly run up hills, facing a deadly spray of machine-gun fire—how could you not be affected? Your sense of safety, of limits, starts to shift. Day in and day out, you are watching soldiers sacrifice themselves, giving their youth to the deadly machines of war.

  As Hemingway writes of the war in Spain, “You learned the dry-mouthed, fear-purged, purging ecstasy of battle, and you fought that summer and that fall for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny, for all the things that you believed and for the new world you had been educated into.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair that I’m still alive,” Taro had remarked one evening after a long day photographing the conflict in Brunete.

  Weeks after Taro’s death, Capa emerges a changed man. “Part of Capa died with Gerda,” a childhood friend says. “She was his true soul mate.”

  “When she died,” his friend Cartier-Bresson says, “he drew a curtain on himself.”

  “Comrades of the International Brigades! . . . You are history, you are legend,” states La Pasionaria on October 17, 1938. Photograph by Capa.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FLIGHT

  AUGUST 1937–OCTOBER 1939

  TIME SWIRLS. The war grinds on, though it is becoming increasingly obvious that the loyalist army, for all its hope and idealism, is simply no match for the professional forces of the rebels fortified by Hitler’s and Mussolini’s air power.

  By late 1937, Capa recovers enough to go back to Spain, where he heads to the mountain city of Teruel with the journalist Herbert Matthews and covers a major battle. The civil war has fallen into the same pattern: an initial success for the government forces as they surge forward and capture enemy territory. The journalists rush in to portray a loyalist success, only to find days, weeks later how fragile and temporary the victory. A debilitating stalemate follows, until the inevitable counterattack by Franco’s troops. Finally, the government side retreats.

  Capa has grown cynical about the war. This is the new Capa: more restless than ever, always moving, careless about appointments, showing up late—as if to assert that no one can ever claim him again. As his biographer Richard Whelan understood, “His closest friends sensed another side of him, the part that remained André Friedmann, who had been deeply wounded by Gerda’s death and remained profoundly grieved.”

  Martha Gellhorn will fictionalize Capa in a short story, describing how he “came and went as he chose, obeyed no one, made and spent money like water, and any man would envy his looks. . . . He made no plans, he roamed. He roamed all day and most of the night, finding people he knew, collecting strangers, eating when hungry, drinking everywhere, talking, talking.”

  This book was designed by Capa’s former mentor André Kertész, with text by journalist Jay Allen, whom Capa had met in Bilbao.

  Capa’s friendships still run deep, though. Back in Paris in August, when a nervous Ted Allan shows up on crutches at his studio door and confesses, “I loved her!” Capa’s response is to laugh and say, “How could you not help loving her?” Then he takes in the bewildered young man and travels with him to America. There he reunites with his mother, who has safely settled in New York City. He also makes arrangements to publish a photography book with his, Taro’s, and Chim’s images, Death in the Making, which he dedicates to Gerda Taro, “who spent one year at the Spanish front, and who stayed on.”

  But then he is on the move again. He is finally on a ship to China, now serving as a cameraman with his friend Joris Ivens, who is making a documentary. In China, he shows pictures of Taro and tells everyone she was his wife. In the future, he will have a great many romances, many affairs, but he will never again form an attachment like the one he had with Taro.

  Capa is now entirely a nomad. He will always keep moving. His only bride is photography.

  1938

  Europe is becoming ever more dangerous. By the time Capa returns from China on September 22, the Nazis have marched into Austria to cheering crowds and annexed the country. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signs the Munich Agreement in September, hoping to appease Hitler by giving him Czechoslovakia. Stalin shifts his calculations and starts to make overtures to Hitler. “Here the moral[e] is bad, and I don’t know what is coming,” Capa writes his mother.

  Capa goes back to Spain for yet another sad moment. Juan Negrín, the Republic’s prime minister, made a desperate move: he promised to send all the foreign recruits—the entirety of the International Brigades—back to their homes. He hopes—really only wishes—that if the loyalists send their foreign fighters away, the world will make sure that Germany and Italy are kept out of Spain. Capa will be there to photograph the ceremony as the volunteers are dismissed. The loyalist side is even weaker, and no one stirs against Franco’s allies.

  On October 25, Capa and Chim drive out to the small village of Les Masies, where government and military leaders are bidding farewell to a large group of brigadiers from all over the world.

  Hundreds and hundreds of men crowd into the courtyard of the Villa Engracia, where they are praised by the prime minster, who tells the volunteers they did not fight in vain. Capa moves around, sometimes on the second floor, which has an open terrace, sometimes down below among the men. He takes some of his best and most moving photos of these battle-worn soldiers: one man, head tilted, his bent arm in the Popular Front salute, with his fist on his forehead, a tear coursing down his sunburned cheek. Another stands erect, jaw clenched. His burning eyes bear straight ahead; he is barely able to hold in his emotions.

  In these photos Capa seems to be saying good-bye to his own youth, to the dream of Spain—and to Taro, who gave her life for that dream.

  Capa conveys the emotional heartbreak as the International Brigades are disbanded at Les Masies on October 25, 1937.

  “THE GREATEST WAR-PHOTOGRAPHER IN THE WORLD”

  Capa keeps moving. The American press names him “one of the world’s best news photographers.” Even as the war depresses him, be remains committed to its coverage. And so he is there, in November, for part of the battle of Ebro, traveling with Hemingway and the journalist Herbert Matthews.

  Milt Wolff, center, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade march outside Barcelona on October 16, after hearing La Pasionaria bid them farewell. Photograph by Capa.

  On November 7, he steals across the Ebro River on a cold autumn night. Loyalist forces head across the Segre, a tributary of the Ebro. It is a bloody fight—twenty-five thousand will be killed on the loyalist side, soldiers desperately digging into the jagged
, rocky outcrops. The battle leaves behind a haunted landscape, with cartridges littering the broken, dry ground and villages abandoned as ghost towns. So many die there and lie unburied, unremembered, entombed in the ruins.

  The whole of Capa, every fiber in his body, lives for action—the next shot, the next assignment—and the comradeship of those he meets on the road. He pushes himself, even as he knows the situation in Spain is dire, nearly hopeless, even as he is on the brink of exhaustion. His photos of this battle are lauded everywhere: THE GREATEST WAR-PHOTOGRAPHER IN THE WORLD: robert capa, England’s new Picture Post declares, devoting eleven pages to his work along with a big image of him. life’s camera gets closer to spanish war than any camera has ever got before, announces the American photo magazine in December. Capa’s work in Picture Post is his richest to date, and since he writes the text and captions to accompany the photographs, it also offers us a rare glimpse into his thoughts and observations.

  He captures all the drama of the sneak attack: the splash of the men wading across the river, the hammer blows of men building a pontoon bridge. The enemy waits high up on the ridges. Then there are the command officers huddled in caves, strategizing. In the morning, the commander gives the men a short speech like a political rally. “Words are hardly necessary,” Capa explains, “since everyone knows what is at stake.”

  Capa covers the Republic’s desperate struggles in the Ebro.

  Then we see the line of men, rifles in hand, take a bare, rocky hillside, the stretcher bearers following behind. They press upward, even though “the enemy increases its artillery fire from the summit. Twenty grenades rain down on the attackers every minute. In caves and crevices sit the marineros,” Capa writes. “When a grenade comes very close, they press themselves hard against the rock, bend over, and pull their heads in, and wait for what will happen.” The battle explodes in a smoky swirl of gun smoke and billowing dust. Two soldiers aid a wounded soldier. Capa is there for all of it—even the intimate moment as one soldier leans into another, recording a man’s last words: “I want to die. Write my mother and tell her.”