By Michael F. Duggan
Eighty-five years ago this Tuesday, Gerda Taro (1910-1937), “The Girl with the Leica” (she also used a Rollei), was killed during the Loyalist retreat at the Battle of Brunete in the Spanish Civil War. She is believed to be the first female photojournalist killed in combat.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was a particularly vicious conflict; civil wars usually are. In terms of atrocities, modern armor, and strategic bombing—to include the bombing of civilians—it was a dry run for World War II. On one side were the Loyalists or Republicans who represented the legitimate government of the Second Spanish Republic. They were supported by an assortment of anarchists, democrats, socialists, and communists representing the Popular Front as well as the foreign volunteers of the International Brigades (e.g the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, whose last known surviving member, Delmer Berg, died in 2016). They were also supported by Mexico and the Soviet Union. On the other side were the Nationalists of General Francisco Franco, who launched a coup in July 1936. The Nationalists were supported by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Nationalists won, and Franco governed Spain until his death in 1975.
The journalists who covered the war included Claude Cockburn, John Dos Passos, Floyd Gibbons, George Seldes, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, to name a few.
Taro’s real name was Gerta Pohorylle. She was born in Stuttgart on August 1, 1910 to Jewish parents. She fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and relocated to Paris where she met a young Hungarian photographer named Endre Friedmann. She would change her name to Taro (after a Japanese painter); Friedmann changed his name to Robert Capa. In 1936 the pair traveled to Barcelona to cover the war in Spain. Like all war photographers, Taro shot the war from the front, distancing herself from Capa (who had proposed to her) and working alone. It has been suggested that Taro actually took the “Falling Soldier” (“Loyalist Soldier at the Moment of Death”) photograph attributed to Capa, and one of the most famous war photographs of all time.
There are two different accounts of the accident that resulted in her death. The first states that on July 25, 1937, she was standing on the runningboard of a car carrying wounded when a tank crashed into it. The other account holds that a tank backed up without warning, running over her.1 She died the following day. Six days later, on the day she would have turned 27, there was a parade in her honor in Paris. She is interred at the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise.
Capa went on to cover WWII, taking some of the most well-known photographs of the D-Day landing and became a legend. After the war he reported from the USSR and Israel during its founding. He was killed by a landmine on March 25, 1954 near Thai Binh during the First Indochina War.
In 2010, a suitcase turned up with more than 4,000 previously unpublished negative images by Capa and Taro (126 rolls of film). They are the subject of the 2011 film, The Mexican Suitcase.
Note
Mark Kurlansky, The Importance of Not Being Ernest, (Coral Gables, FL: Books & Books Press, 2022), 119.