Original subtitles

(bells tinkle)

(sheep bleats)

- So it was about two years ago.

I was looking through this box of old family photographs,

and I came across this one.

This, I could recognise immediately, was my father

when he was very young, 27, 28 years old,

in the Spanish Civil War.

And here he is, a picture of him

treating this very ill patient, obviously female.

And there's a certain tenderness about this photograph,

and the expression on my father's face

suddenly made me very proud of him

and what he was doing in the Spanish Civil War.

And I didn't know who the patient was or the circumstances,

but I thought, I mean, I want to share this.

So I put it on Twitter,

and then over the next few days,

there were a number of replies on Twitter,

including one saying, "Could you please give us

more details of this picture?

Where was it? Who was the patient?"

And I didn't know anything more about it.

But I then looked on the back,

and here in my father's rather bad writing,

it says, I think, "Frente Brunete Junio 37."

Then it says, "Mrs. Frank Capa

of 'Ce Soir' of Paris.

Killed at Brunete."

A day or two later, somebody replied saying,

"I think you're talking here about Gerda Taro."

And now I didn't know who Gerda Taro was at all.

And then the Twitter went viral.

(sombre music)

My father didn't talk a lot about the Spanish Civil War.

In fact, I learned more about

how he came to be there and what he was doing there

from an interview, an oral tape interview

that he gave back in 1992, which was fascinating.

- [Interviewer] Any other incidents or anecdotes

that you can give about the Brunete days?

- [John] Well, the only thing that,

looking back at it, was extra interest to me,

that we had a wounded woman, more or less dead

when she came into my hands.

I found out much later that she was wife

of the famous wartime photographer, Robert Capa.

She was not in the army,

she was a reporter, newspaper woman.

But I did not know, not a clue who she was

when somebody took a picture of me cleaning her up,

the blood from her face, but I did not know who she was.

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] Gerda Taro.

That's the name you chose for yourself.

Back when photojournalism was being invented,

you took pictures of

the Spanish Republic's desperate struggle.

You were creating pioneering work,

but you lost your life to the misery of war

just before your 27th birthday.

For many years, you sank into oblivion,

and yet your pictures speak to the roots

of our shared history, the madness of men, the pain of war,

but also the ideal of brotherhood

and hope for a better world.

Your mythical story deserves to be told.

Your pictures should be dug up.

For that, we must go on a journey

that mingles the present and the past.

(sombre music)

(ship horn blares)

We could begin the story in the late summer of 1937.

Robert Capa, who Time Magazine would come to crown

as one of the greatest photographers of all time,

was on a boat to New York.

He owed his reputation to his pictures

of the Spanish Civil War, which was still raging

when he crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

He had not been alone.

He had taken up arms as a war reporter alongside Gerda Taro.

As a tribute to the woman he had also deeply loved,

he published a book of their pictures together

dedicated to her.

"For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front

and who stayed on."

Little did he know, that was the last time

that Gerda Taro's pictures were brought to light.

(ship horn blares)

For nearly half a century,

they were indiscriminately mingled

with those of her famous partner.

We must follow his footsteps to find them once more.

(pensive music)

Gerda Taro never went to New York.

Yet, that is where her work's legacy lies,

at the International Centre of Photography,

created in 1974 by Cornell Capa, Robert Capa's brother.

He wanted to conserve the archives

of activist photographers, of lost photographers,

whose pictures aim to change the world.

(pensive music)

- What makes some of Taro's work so powerful,

I think, is what she brings to each image.

She was very passionately engaged with the Republican cause,

and I think that engagement is reflected

in every single one of her images.

Taro was not a sort of objective,

fair, and balanced reporter.

She was highly partisan and she was making

prints and images to support the Republican side.

She was gonna go right up to the front lines.

I mean, she wasn't gonna sit back and photograph babies

and children and, you know, happy subjects.

She was really gonna go in deep

and to show the kind of real casualty

that she was seeing in Spain.

And I think her images absolutely reflect that,

you know, broader engagement with war photography.

(sombre music)

She died, and her career was not even a year.

And in fact, as a photographer at all,

which is quite extraordinary that she's so quickly

picked up the camera and immediately knew how to use it

and to make effective strong graphic images.

(sombre music)

Journalist Andre Chamson wrote in 1937 that,

"She carried within her the genie of Madrid,

made of a woman's smile and the heart of a hero."

Was it heroism?

Where do the sense of urgency,

which led to risk her life 2,000 kilometres away

from her birth town come from?

Maybe we can find the reasons

for her Spanish engagement in Germany.

In Stuttgart, the town where she was born

on the 1st of August, 1910,

in what was then still called the German Empire.

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] Gerda Taro only carried that name for a year.

She was born as Gerta Pohorylle to a Jewish family,

immigrants from Galicia, an Austrian province

that passed over to Poland.

She grew up during the Great War,

which led to the fall of the empire.

Far from the political turmoil

that violently scarred the young Weimar Republic,

she became an elegant, cheerful young girl

with a gift for foreign languages and studying business.

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] In 1929, just as Gerda was turning 19,

the economic crisis led the family to move to Leipzig,

a few hundred miles away.

Her father had decided to set up a new business there.

She soon met a young communist,

a member of the Socialist Writers Union,

who would come to exert a significant influence

over her future choices.

His name was Georg Kuritzkes.

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

- [Narrator] "A jazz enthusiast who dances like a god."

This is how Gerda described Georg

in a letter to her childhood friend.

"It's true that he's very young, but he's damn intelligent.

He has amazing eyes, and he is incredibly in love with me.

I'll tell you more if the Nazis

don't beat me to death beforehand."

(sombre music)

This offhand sentence reflects

an increasingly menacing political context for Gerda,

Georg, and her new Leipzig friends.

Most of them were Jewish, socialist, or communist.

Hitler's rise to power in January 1933

intensify the crackdown on left-wing circles.

On the 18th of March, Gerta Pohorylle was arrested.

She had been distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets.

Yesterday's frivolous concerns

made way for the need to protest.

She was detained for two weeks.

One of her fellow inmates later recounted that Gerda

had arrived in their cell with a bright chequered dress,

practically apologising for it.

It's just because she was going dancing

when she was arrested.

She added, "None of us could compete with Gerda's patience,

her confidence, her composure."

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Would things have been different

had she decided to follow Georg, her Leipzig sweetheart,

who chose to go in exile in Italy?

If she had not chosen Paris as her refuge for a new life?

The city that she came to in the autumn of 1933

had a reputation of being a safe haven

for German cultural and political immigrants.

(sombre music)

With one of her Leipzig friends,

she settled into a former maid's room,

a few streets down from the Montparnasse cafes.

The refugees met on terraces around cups of coffee,

looking for jobs, exchanging the latest

harrowing news from Germany.

What could a 24-year-old young woman possibly have felt

as a foreigner in a strange city?

With the need to feed herself,

she went from selling newspapers for awhile

to becoming a typist.

There was also a sense of freedom.

She had no ties.

Anything was possible.

(bell rings)

(sombre music)

In 1934, about a year after her arrival,

she met a young man on the terrace of the Cafe du Dome.

He was Hungarian, Jewish, and he had also fled

to escape Nazism, a small camera slung around his shoulder.

His name was not yet Robert Capa, but Andre Friedmann.

- Andre Friedmann actually had published

his photographs before he came to Paris.

He was working in Berlin in an agency there.

It was in sort of an extraordinary situation

where he was assigned to go photograph Trotsky

who was giving a lecture to students in Copenhagen.

And, you know, typical Capa story, he smuggled in his camera

and was sitting right below Trotsky

and, you know, made these extraordinary photographs

from below with his arms extended,

you know, really, again, the hallmark kind of photograph

by Capa, very physical, very emotional.

So he had, you know, started his career

and he clearly could see success,

but it really, that was short lived.

And when he came to Paris, he really had no reputation

other than a few friends that he could call on.

- [Narrator] 9th of September, 1935.

"Imagine, mother, my hair is short,

my tie is hanging on my neck,

my shoes are shiny and I appear on stage at seven o'clock.

It is the end of the Bohemian life.

Naturally, there is a girlfriend

who would gain your acceptance also

because she is not the last cause of my regulated life."

30th of September, 1935.

"Our money is equal to zero, but we don't starve

because what is needed for eating somehow we obtain.

Gerda takes pictures and I make enlargements."

3rd of February, 1936.

"Today, I moved back to Gerda's.

She helps me a lot because she has good relations

with all the editors, and she takes me with her everywhere."

8th of April, 1936.

"You can't imagine, would you, the way we live.

Up at seven, hustling all day,

and spending the night manufacturing articles.

I named Gerda the ragged one.

She owns fewer clothes than me

and it's continually ragged one place or another."

(soft music)

Taking pictures, writing captions,

rushing from editors to agencies to sell them.

The man who became Gerda's partner

introduced her to photography and they experienced

the reporter's job together.

Was she the one to devise their new identity?

Was it in order to create a space for her

amongst the competition?

The fact remains that in the spring of 1936,

they took on new names, simple names

that carried neither history nor homeland.

He became Robert Capa, she became Gerda Taro.

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

(crowd chants)

- [Narrator] On the 14th of July 1936 in Paris,

the popular front celebrated Bastille Day

for the first time.

Capa and Taro were amongst the crowd

beside their friends of the time,

other budding photographers, such as David Seymour,

also known as Chim, or Henri Cartier-Bresson,

or even Fred Stein, one of Gerda Taro's close peers.

Capa for his part took the pictures

that started to make him known.

- It seemed like if you think about the relationship,

Capa was sort of a project for Taro,

and Capa was very willing to be the project.

And, you know, Capa by himself had never really figured out

the real, you know, steps to getting what he had wanted.

So Taro was this, you know, incredible, important,

essential force behind his success.

(soft music)

- I'm not sure how my father and Gerda Taro met.

I assume it was either in a cafe or in a meeting,

but they were certainly friends with the same people

because of their political affiliation.

They both had to flee because they were both

active socialists and anti-fascists.

So that's really what they had in common.

I don't like to handle these very often.

They're so delicate, they're like 70, 80 years old.

All pictures of Paris in the '30s.

So it's 90, 100 years old.

My father was starting to become established

as a photographer and he was taking a lot of street scenes,

but he was also taking a lot of portraits.

And Gerda asked him if her friend, Andre Friedmann,

could come and use their darkroom.

And their darkroom was in fact their bathroom.

So that was her real introduction to photography.

Fried used his Leica to take pictures of Gerda Taro

in a few different situations.

Outside at the Cafe du Dome,

inside in their apartment, which was his studio.

(sombre music)

Here she is as a model.

You know, she's posing here.

This is not a refugee as you would think

a refugee, you know?

This is someone who's done fashion work before.

And here, this is one of the funny pictures of her.

You know, she's always joking around with them,

I am sure of that.

And my father was a joker also,

so I think between the two of them,

they must've had a lot of fun together.

And here's one that shows her personality.

She is very sure of herself.

I wouldn't want to mess around with this woman.

She's tough.

She's got determination.

(sombre music)

Gerda Taro was a pioneer.

She was an anti-fascist woman, pioneer photographer.

That's unique.

You know, we can only learn from her

and from her photographs

and what she went through and her courage.

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara said of her that

she didn't see the job as a mechanical and blind activity.

It was a thought-out passion in service of a new humankind.

Spain is an unavoidable stop for anyone

retracing her footsteps.

In the summer of 1936,

it was Gerda Taro's trial by fire.

(singers singing in foreign language)

- [Narrator] The country that she discovered

with Robert Capa in the early months

of August 1936 was at war.

On the 18th of July, a coup by General Franco

marked the beginning of a violent clash

between partisans of the military push

and those of the Republican popular front.

(people chattering indistinctly)

"When we reached Barcelona on August the 5th,

the fighting was over.

Shots no longer echoed in the streets.

The dead had been taken away

for the people had triumphed," wrote Robert Capa.

(people cheer)

Faces were joyful in Gerda Taro's first known pictures.

Barcelona had chosen its side, and so had she.

Once the Republicans, her brothers in arms,

she who had fled a country plagued by Nazism.

Through Capa's lens, we can see her wearing

the classic overalls worn by militia women

in the first months of the war.

(calm guitar music)

(Lorna speaks in foreign language)

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

(cheerful music)

- [Narrator] After a few days,

Taro and Capa took the road looking for a frontline

which was not always clearly defined.

First it was the arrogant front in the north.

Then Madrid, then Andalusia.

The conflict in Spain marked a turning point

in war photography.

It was the first time that small, light cameras

allowed photographers to get close up to the action.

In the absence of fighting,

Gerda Taro's camera captured farm life scenes at first,

soldiers and peasants working together

in a collective defence effort.

On the Cordoba front in the south,

Capa and Taro finally found what they needed

to take the pictures they were looking for

to start people's consciences.

(bombs boom)

A Spanish journalist who crossed their paths there

wrote a very exhilarating enthusiasm.

"Without weapons, with not much more than a camera,

they face the most ravaged battlefields,

encouraging each other mutually.

They would have photographed the enemy's

loaded gun barrels if they could."

(guns bang)

This is where Capa took the picture

that was to become a symbol of the drama

playing out in Spain, "The Falling Soldier."

Decades later, questions were raised about its authenticity.

(sombre music)

For the time being, both photographers returned to Paris,

feeling that they had found their place.

- That first trip to Spain was incredibly successful

for Capa and slightly successful for Taro.

But she had gone from very little,

she'd gone from sort of nothing.

So she became, you know, that really gave her the sense

and the confidence that she could make photographs

that were good for the magazines.

(sombre music)

(rain taps) (thunder booms)

(Susana speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

(Susana speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

(bombs boom)

(crickets chirp)

- [Narrator] Returning to Spain a few months later,

Gerda Taro found the country exhausted

by a long winter of intense fighting.

The military coup had led to a fratricidal war.

Franco's army was actively backed

by the Nazi air force and Mussolini's Italian troops.

France and England had officially chosen not to intervene.

On the Republican side, along with Soviet military aid,

young volunteers poured in from all countries

organised into international brigades.

The impression that Gerda Taro made

on one of these brigade members

was that of an adorable young woman.

This is how he described her arrival

amongst them in his diary.

"She wears trousers, a beret

on her beautiful strawberry blonde hair

and a small revolver.

It is not hard to imagine the effect

that the graceful reporter's arrival had.

To welcome her, two bottles were opened.

One could even hear the young girl's

bright laughter from outside."

(sombre music)

Gerda Taro and the fighters shared the same hopes,

the same generosity, and often the same age.

The same disillusionment also, the same pain.

(sombre music)

They valued her talent and her courage.

Some nicknamed her La Pequena Rubia, the little blonde girl.

They even whispered that it brought luck

to have the small reporter by their side for a few days.

(Susana speaks in foreign language)

- [Narrator] As the weeks went by,

she often went to Spain alone.

Her love story with Robert Capa started to wither away.

Perhaps there was no space for love in times of war.

Their professional relationship

on the other hand evened out.

She who was once an apprentice became a respected partner

and her name became well-recognized in the press.

It soon started to appear alone.

(reporter speaks in foreign language)

(worker speaks in foreign language)

(reporter speaks in foreign language)

- [Narrator] Her gaze stood out

for it was in touch with the pain of war.

- I think actually the most pivotal story

is the morgue story, for which she received a cover story

on a magazine for that and a full page

with her clear and full credit.

And I think it's also subject matter

that really pulls her apart from Capa at that point,

and does a story that he didn't do and never did

in that kind of proximity to death.

This is, I think, where Taro becomes Taro.

(sombre music)

(Lorna speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] But the Western democracies

turned a blind eye to the Spanish pain.

Is this why Gerda Taro started to take

increasingly greater risks?

(sombre music)

The spring of 1937 transformed her.

Her signature was as sought after

as that of her colleagues Capa and Chim.

And yet a few weeks later, she would pass into oblivion.

(sombre music)

Looking at her last negatives,

one cannot help but wish to warn her

to not meddle in the battle of Brunete,

the great offensive with which the Republicans

hope to save Madrid from Franco's menace.

To go back to Paris, where Capa awaited her to go to China,

where he had obtained a contract for them both.

To not wish to show the world a Republican victory

at all costs in this early month of July 1937.

(sombre music)

(Sven speaks in foreign language)

(bombs boom)

(Sven speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] In a general panic,

she left the frontline by hopping onto the running board

of a car transporting the wounded.

After a few miles, a Soviet tank came out of a wheat field

and accidentally crashed into the car,

seriously wounding Gerda Taro.

(sombre music)

(Sven speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music) (singer hums)

- [Narrator] After her accident,

Gerda Taro was taken to the British hospital

in the town of El Escorial.

She died there in the early hours of the 26th of July, 1937,

after having asked what had become her camera.

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] Her body was repatriated to Madrid

where a wake was held in the winter garden

of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals,

the friends she had said goodbye to two days earlier.

Artists and political figures paid her tributes,

such as writer Leon Moussinac, who wrote,

"The pain we feel, we, her comrades, has spread like blood.

We shall not forget the harsh trace of our tears

on our cheeks, nor in our eyes, Gerda.

The, oh, so clear message of your youth,

of your courage, of your struggle."

(sombre music)

- You know, over the years, there've been

a variety of things written about Taro,

and some of which have taken a very fictitious direction,

in part because we know so little about her,

and that the fact that she died

having, you know, only worked for such a short time,

there's so much potential in any direction

she could have taken.

I mean, people who die young are very easy to mythologize.

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] As soon as she had gone,

Gerda Taro's image started to fade.

Hardly any known photos remain of the funeral

organised for her by the French communist party.

No film archives showing the procession

followed by thousands of people,

crossing Paris towards the Pere Lachaise Cemetery

on the 2nd of August, 1937.

Louis Aragon, who led the daily communist newspapers,

"Ce Soir," that had published many of Gerda Taro's pictures

later wrote, "The people of Paris held

an extraordinary funeral for little Taro,

and all the flowers of the world seemed to be there."

(sombre music)

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Who cared about the Spanish Civil War

once it was over?

In 1939, Franco had only just seized power through blood.

But the Second World War came to erode his memory.

After having photographed the exodus

of Spanish Republicans fleeing their country,

Robert Capa immigrated to New York

to be with his mother and brother Cornell

and continued to cover the world's conflict.

He himself lost his life in Indo-China in 1954.

The portrait of the greatest war photographer

travelled the world, and nobody remembered

that it had been taken on the Segovia front

by a woman named Gerda Taro.

(Lorna speaks in foreign language)

- Taro's legacy was completely wrapped up in Capa's

because all of her family died during World War II.

There was no one there to take care of it.

And there was no, you know, one site or location

where the work remained,

but it was all spread out in diverse places.

So it was, you know, as Cornell was scooping everything up,

Taro was just a part of that.

Taro's story was only a small chapter

within the larger legacy.

(horn honks)

- [Narrator] Would her story have ended there

without the extraordinary discovery

that was made 70 years after her death?

On the eve of the millennium,

she was no more than a shadow.

At most, she was remembered as

one of Robert Capa's girlfriends.

But one day, a few thousand negatives

from the Spanish Civil War that were believed to be lost

were found by chance in Mexico

with the heir of the Mexican ambassador to Vichy.

(sombre music)

They had been gathered by Robert Capa,

then lost at the turmoil of the German occupation.

1/3 of these negatives, which make up what is now known

as the Mexican Suitcase, are attributed to Gerda Taro,

thus bringing her work, which had sunk into oblivion,

back to life.

- You can see the film goes in,

the rolled film goes in the squares on the bottom.

And then the top had squares to mark the content

of the corresponding film.

When the news the Mexican Suitcase

first appeared internationally, it became such a sensation

because I think it touched on everyone's fears

and everyone's hope and dreams and desires

that something lost to them years later would return.

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

- One of my favourite films in the suitcase

is of Taro's of the morgue, outside the morgue in Valencia.

She starts outside in the interior of the morgue,

looking out through the gates,

looking at all of the people who had come to gather

to find out information about their families.

And you can see her literally walking,

pacing like a panther, you know,

looking at the faces of the people in the morgue

and framing and really looking, you know,

what is the best shot here.

And I think at the seventh frame,

she turns her camera finally vertically

and then takes one shot and then goes in closer

and gets a second shot.

And it's that picture that ends up

in the cover of "Regards Magazine."

You really see her work.

You really see her struggling to figure out

what is going to ring to the editors

and ring out to the ultimate readers of the magazines.

And you just don't see that in a pile of prints,

because you may have only that one selected image.

So you have no idea where it became before or after.

(sombre music)

- One day I got a call from Cynthia Young,

who's a curator at the ICP.

And she said, "I have some interesting news for you.

We just got back all of Robert Capa's pictures,

negatives from Mexico in this thing

we're calling the Mexican Suitcase,

and we found two rolls of Fred Stein's pictures in it."

And I was stunned.

(sombre music)

I know that my father gave those negatives to Capa.

In fact, during the big funeral procession for Gerda Taro,

my father saw Capa leave the cortege.

He just couldn't take the pain.

It was too much for him.

He couldn't stand it.

My father realised just how intense his feeling

and the devastation that he felt for the loss of Taro.

So because of that, he offered Capa these negatives.

And I think that Capa put these negatives of Gerda Taro

together with the rest of his negatives

of the Spanish Civil War

because that was a chapter in his life

that he wanted to keep that chapter together.

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] Looking at your images,

the outline of your shadow hones your negatives,

just as it hones this journey on your footsteps.

For decades, your story was blended with Robert Capa's,

Elena Garro, the Mexican writer

whose path you crossed in Spain wrote that you were

surrounded by the tragic romantic aura of young,

handsome adventurers in love.

(sombre music)

How can we resist the myth?

How can we grow at you your rightful place in history?

(sombre music)

- You know, over the years,

I've read so many articles about Taro proposals,

and I've been shocked and struck by the fact that

they wanna do a project on Gerda and Capa.

And there's this real, you know, imbalance

of how they approach the people that there's this intimacy,

you know immediate intimacy with Taro as a woman,

and that they can immediately call her by her first name,

where with Capa, he's sort of, you know, the respected man

whose name you're only gonna refer to by the last.

It's an interesting difference

in the way that we approach male historical figures

and female historical figures.

(sombre music)

(Lorna speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

(Irme speaks in foreign language)

(sombre music)

- [Narrator] One may want to fit

all the puzzle's pieces together,

but we must accept that some are missing.

Accept that we shall never hear your voice.

And suddenly, see you appear in an archive,

you were in Valencia on the 4th of July, 1937

to cover the opening of

the Writers Congress for the Defence of Culture.

While war was raging, around 200 writers from 30 countries

were there to showcase their support

to the Spanish Republic's struggle

and their unwavering resistance to fascism.

A Soviet filmmaker captured your silhouette,

fleeting shots filmed just before your passing.

(crowd applauds)

(sombre music)

Today, undying traces of you remain.

Your photographs.

In a tribute paid by Leon Moussinac who recalled,

"This fearfully vivid image,

the sharp, charming, deliberate outline of a woman

above the Brunete wheat fields.

A small child's fist striking the sky,

while suddenly out of the quiet, the quiet of farewell,

a skylark busts into song, and Gerda smiles."

(sombre violin music)