Photography - Spanish Civil War

Andre Friedmann never got over the death, in Spain in 1937, of his lover Gerda Taro. They had met as impoverished refugee students in Paris in 1934, and together invented a new persona for him to help him sell pictures to American magazines: Robert Capa. The ruse worked, and both of them started getting work, primarily from the shots they sent back of the Spanish Civil War, published in Life Magazine, and the like. Capa went back to Paris to arrange a new assignment in China for the couple in the summer of 1937. Taro was run over by a talk during the retreat from Brunete on July 27th of that year. Capa was devastated, but it made him even more determined to follow his maxim ‘if your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough’. Killed by a landmine in Indo-China is 1952, Capa is now generally recognised as the most influential war photographer of our times. The agency he co-founded in 1947, Magnum, has become one of the world’s most distinguished, a by-word for quality.

Charleston will be exhibiting Magnum pictures of the Spanish Civil War, including works by Capa and Taro, throughout the autumn. The conflict attracted a number of international intellectuals to join the Republican cause against the insurrection by the Fascist military commander Francisco Franco, including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, who both wrote of their experiences. And poet Julian Bell, son of Vanessa and Quentin, who was killed nine days before Taro, during the same battle, while serving as an ambulance river. AL