Text and
Color Photos: José Manuel Serrano Esparza
From left to right beyond the six employees of French railways lowering Gerda Taro´s coffin from the train coming from Spain : Karl Pohorylle (Gerda Taro´s younger brother, wearing glasses, doesn´t dare look at his sister´s coffin), Hersch Pohorylle (Gerda Taro´s father, in the middle of the image, with white hair and also wearing glasses), Robert Capa and Oskar Pohorylle (Gerda Taro´s elder brother).
Friday July
30th, 1937. Gare d´Austerlitz Train Station, Paris. 11:00 h in the morning. An
old Jewish man called Hersch Pohorylle, born in Eastern Galitzia
(Austro-Hungarian Poland) and arrived from Stuttgart (Germany) a few hours ago
with his two sons Oskar (25 years old) and Karl (23 years old), is utterly
downhearted and is about to recite Kaddish before a coffin covered with
flowers, which has lain in state in Madrid and Valencia between July 26 and 29,
and contains the body of his daughter Gerda Taro.
Selective reframing of a picture showing Gerda Taro on July 4, 1937 shooting
with a Leica III with Leitz Summar 5 cm f/2 during her coverage of the
inauguration of the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of
Culture held in Valencia. This was the same camera and lens with which the
German photojournalist made vast majority of pictures during her stay in
Valsequillo (Córdoba) very few days later, while a much smaller percentage of
the images created by her in that village were created by her with a Leica II
(Model D).
© Walter Reuter
Robert Capa
is near, watching the scene, but this time he doesn´t dare approach enough. His
soul is broken and he doesn´t even want to have a look. Throughout only a year
he´s already seen a lot of death and suffering, covering the Spanish Civil War.
Within a short time he will become one of the war photographers present in more
armed conflicts in history. But this time the sea of tears is himself.
Seichi Inoue
(a photographer working for the Japanese Mainichi publishing company and a friend of the
young Hungarian photojournalist) and Else Triolet (Louis Aragon´s woman) have
to take him to his Parisian studio at rue de Fondrevaux 37, where he will be
without eating or drinking anything until the day in which the aforementioned
casket will be buried on August 1, 1937 in the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise, after
a funeral cortege that will leave at 10:30 h in the morning from the Maison de
la Culture (where the body which is inside it has been exposed on July 30 and
31, 1937).
When the
spade starts throwing sand on the coffin, the old Jewish man with white hair
starts reciting some passages of the Torah, and Robert Capa, feeling guilty
about the death of the just buried person, the great love of his life,
collapses again and cries sorrowfully.
The old
Jewish man, whose named is Hersch Pohorylle, married to Ghittel Boral, finishes
pronouncing his words and experiences a great grief, also beginning to sob
tearfully.
The woman
who has just been buried is Gerda Taro, his daughter, who only four weeks
before has been here:
© jmse. October 2011
©
jmse. October 2011
It´s 7:00
a.m in the morning. 74 years later.
It dawns in
Valsequillo (Córdoba, Spain). Huge fields of wheat surround the area on the
left of the stretch of the Córdoba-Almorchón railways going on the west of the
village of Valsequillo.
Gerda Taro
and Robert Capa were here, in early July 1937.
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP
New York
She
photographed the village peasants reaping the wheat, while he filmed with a
motion picture camera.
Leica III with Leitz Summar 5 cm f/2. This was the rangefinder camera and highly
luminous lens used by Gerda Taro in Valsequillo. Introduced in 1933, this
photographic tool offered three key improvements with respect to the Leica II
(Model D) from 1932 : an enhanced rangefinder with a magnification ratio of 1.5
x ; a very useful separate dial to set the slow speeds of 1 second, 1/2 second,
1/4 second, 1/8 second and 1/20 second; and a lug on each side to fasten the
neckstrap and enable a much more comfortable transport.
© jmse
Diagonal left back view of a Leica III showing on its top left area the
eyepiece of the rangefinder (beside the horizontal eight) and the viewfinder,
which are located 37 mm apart. Anyway, the very large VF magnification of 1.5 x
meant a great and very crisp vision for the photographer.
© jmse
Diagonal right front view of the Leica III with its Leitz Summar 5 cm f/2 in
folded position. The overall exceedingly small dimensions of camera/lens combo
and its very light weight meant unfettered freedom of movements to
photojournalists, with the steady advantage of being able to easily shoot
handheld and get great pictures, from whose 24 x 36 mm format negatives
top-notch quality enlargements could be made up to roughly a size of 30 x 40
cm.
© jmse
Gerda Taro
used a chromed Leica III camera with Leitz Summar 5 cm f/2 lens — Taro had already been using a black
lacquered Leica II D with Leitz Elmar 5 cm f/3.5 lens updated to Leica III— ,
while Capa used a Bell & Howell 35 mm movie camera with a Taylor-Hobson
Cooke 47 mm f/2.5 lens.
In
1933, after intensive toil of some years, Oskar Barnack could create a further
key technological trait: a special dial for slow speeds (1/20 s, 1/8 s, 1/4 s,
1/2 s and 1 second) that would be decisive to increase chances of getting
pictures handheld at very low speeds with available light up to 1/4 s and
between 1/2 s and 1 s if the photographer had where to support his/her back)
working through a train gear built for it inside the shutter mechanism.
© jmse
6
elements in 4 groups Leitz Summar 5 cm f/2 uncoated. Both the cosmetic
appearance and mechanical construction of this lens are truly gorgeous, in the
same way as its also metallic cap with the classical Leica logo chiselled on it
with commendable thoroughness. © jmse
Though not reaching the stratospheric optical performance for the time of the
Leitz Elmar 50 mm f/3.5 designed in 1925 by Professor Max Berek and the Carl
Zeiss Jena Sonnar 5 cm f/1.5 designed by Ludwig Bertele in 1932 which were the best
standard 50 mm lenses in the world until 1953 when the Summicron-M 50 mm f/2
collapsible 1st version in LTM39 mount was introduced, the Leitz Summar 5 cm
f/2 yielded a very good image quality (albeit there´s a significant difference
between center where it reaches a good sharpness, and borders and corners where
it is soft), that was often degraded by its very soft front element,
exceedingly prone to scratches and cleaning marks, as happened to the one used
by Gerda Taro in Valsequillo in early July of 1937, which had previously also
been used extensively in Los Blázquez (Córdoba) in May 1937 and La Granjuela
(Córdoba) in June of that year. © jmse
Lateral view of a Leitz Summar 5 cm f/2 revealing the top-notch quality brass
focusing helicoid, the focusing scale and a praiseworthy exquisite attention to
detail. It is a very solid lens manufactured with brass, steel, chrome and
glass, in addition to featuring very small dimensions and a weight of only 180
g. The kind of image delivered by this lens is unique, with a gentle glow, particularly in high key areas, resulting in pictures oozing vintage
aesthetics and a special charm. © jmse
The 136
negatives exposed in Valsequillo (Córdoba) by Gerda Taro in the beginning of
1937 and found inside The Mexican Suitcase made possible the discovery in
October 2011 of the places where Gerda Taro (accompanied by Capa, who shot with
his cinematographic Bell & Howell Eyemo 35 mm camera) got the pictures of
peasants harvesting the wheat those days, along with the identification of the
German photojournalist from Jewish descent in one of the images.
Gerda Taro
and Robert Capa made a comprehensive photojournalistic coverage of different
areas, photographing and filming above all peasants working at full-swing
reaping the wheat harvest, and they walked across a wide range of places
located near the stretches of the Córdoba-Almorchón railway going on the north
and west of the village of Valsequillo, between Sierra Trapera - in the north -
and the Sierras of La Morala and del Castillo - in the west -, including some
areas of Malagana, El Llano, Los Cuartones, Arroyo de la Fuente, Casa de
Valdematas, Monterrubio, Cortijo de Garlo, El Cañazo, and the Cortijo de La
Fundición.
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New York
©
jmse. October 2011
Photo: Gerda
Taro. © ICP New York
© jmse. October 2011
Photo: Gerda
Taro. © ICP New York
© jmse.
October 2011
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New York
© jmse.
October 2011
REASONS FOR
THE VISIT OF GERDA TARO AND ROBERT CAPA TO VALSEQUILLO
Since the
beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Valsequillo had been a village
harshly disputed by the Republican and Francoist forces. On November 3, 1936,
the village fell in the hands of Francoist troops, and they held a sway over it
until the night of April 4 1937, when it was captured by the Chapaiev Battalion
of the XIII International Brigade, mostly made up by Polish, Czech and French
combatants, taking 32 prisoners.
In early
April 1937, the Republican high commanders had as a top priority in this zone
of Córdoba the occupation of a triangle made up by Valsequillo, Los Blázquez
and La Granjuela in a first stage and Fuenteobejuna in a second phase, with the
aim of subsequently launching an attack trying to capture Peñarroya-Pueblo
Nuevo, whose very rich mine basin was a major strategic and industrial target.
Therefore,
when Taro and Capa visit Valsequillo during the first week of July 1937, they
probably did it with the purpose of depicting the Republican foreign volunteer
combatants of the XIII International Brigade who had occupied the village since
the first week of April.
And as a
matter of fact, they made two pictures of French international brigadists
inside a house of Valsequillo (three of them being standing and one sitting,
around a table), two pictures of three militiamen walking across the road in
the outskirts of the village (in joyful attitude, applauding and with their
rifles on their shoulders or grabbed in hand), a photograph of an international
brigadist on horseback also in the outskirsts, three group pictures in which a
lot of grandmothers and mothers of the village are posing with their
sons/daughters and grandsons/granddaughters (including some babies being held
in arms), seven pictures of a sow feeding her suckling pigs and three pictures
taken in a street of Valsequillo in which appear two little girls (one of them
wearing a white shirt with round patterns, while the other one is clad in a
dark shirt) who are sitting on a big wooden beam lying on the floor by a car
wheel.
But what
happened was that the arrival of both photojournalists at Valsequillo,
coincided with the peak of the wheat harvest made by the village farmers, which
set up a remarkable photographic and cinematographic chance, to such an extent
that vast majority of the pictures made by Taro and the 35 mm footage shot by
Capa correspond to those agricultural toils developed by the village
inhabitants.
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP
New York
THE WHEAT
CROP TURNED INTO MAIN CHARACTER
The images
made by Gerda Taro in Valsequillo clearly reveal a high level of strenuous
effort to get the best possible images during some days, looking for the most
various taking angles and distances, with a distinct predominance of
rectangular images (only 17 of the 136 pictures are vertical ones), in a
context ruled by a scorching sun, with a temperature around 40º C and groups of
peasants equipped with rakes, brooms and pitchforks who make the tasks of
winnowing and sieving, after the previous threshing with classical threshers
(ancient tool which exerts an outstanding fascination in Gerda Taro, as we´ll
see later) drawn by mules, it all being photographed by the German
photojournalist from Jewish descent.
Photo: Gerda
Taro. © ICP New York
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New York
Photo: Gerda Taro.
© ICP New York
This
reportage by Taro is a highly significant graphic and historical testimony,
because during thirties the quoted stages of wheat reaping were made in a
wholly manual way, with high levels of weariness, sweat and very hard working
days from dawn to dusk, in which around 70 people working for 15 or 20 days
were needed to harvest what is currently made by two people and a machine in
one or two days.
Gerda Taro
got her pictures during the turning point of the wheat reaping, because in the
the previous months there had been the sowing and a series of previous labours
resulting in the preparation of the ground, including the fertilizer spreading,
the plowing and the levelling, essential for an adequate harvest and which were
made with plows pulled by mules or oxen and featuring large wooden planks on
which the peasants went, strenuous tasks that are nowadays also mechanized.
Usually —
and Valsequillo is not an exception in this regard — , late June, July and
August are the optimal periods for wheat reaping, since exceedingly high
temperatures have dried the plants and the humidity levels are very low, which
enables a very good preservation of the seed or straw.
During
thirties, the harvesting was manually made by means of a sickle, in the
shortest possible time, and as the wheat was cut, peasants made sheaves that
remained on the land.
Photo:
Gerda Taro. © ICP New York
IDENTIFICATION
OF GERDA TARO IN ONE OF THE PICTURES
I could
identify Gerda Taro in this photograph in which Robert Capa captures her
filming with a Bell & Howell Eyemo 35 mm motion picture camera coupled to a
Taylor-Hobson Cooke 47 mm f/2.5 lens, while some peasants of Valsequillo winnow
the wheat.
Photo:
Robert Capa. © ICP New York
This image
created by Robert Capa is an exception from the global viewpoint of the
photographic reportage made in Valsequillo, since 134 of the 136 photographs
were made by Gerda Taro, while Capa shot with the Bell & Howell Eyemo 35 mm
movie camera and only made two pictures, both of them being vertical ones, in
which Gerda Taro appears: one with her being standing, full body, on the left
border of the frame (on these lines) holding the Bell & Howell Eyemo 35 mm
cine camera between her hands and filming the peasants winnowing the wheat; and
another one in which only around a third of her standing body can be glimpsed
and because of the suffocating heat, she is wiping her forehead sweat with her
left hand.
Those images
are consecutive pictures and Gerda Taro is wearing a white shirt, dark skirt
and clear slippers.
Bell &
Howell Eyemo 71-A 35 mm format movie camera with Taylor-Hobson Cooke f/2.5
lens, whose production started in 1925. It was the model used by Capa to film
scenes in Valsequillo, though Gerda Taro shot with it at some moments.
Its weight
was 7 pounds and the shooting mechanism began on pressing a trigger, with the
film moving from the first frame exactly at the chosen speed, and stopping when
the trigger was released.
With the
standard inner 100 ft magazine it was possible to film a bit more than one
minute footage.
Both 35 mm
and 16 mm Bell & Howell cameras with Taylor-Hobson Cooke lenses were one of
the flagships for handheld filming during second half of twenties, thirties and
forties, with the added bonus of a virtually unbeatable quality/price ratio,
very high standard of manufacture and components and a huge endurance to the
hardest professional use under every kind of location and atmospheric
condition, which turned it into a favourite choice by cinema directors like
Stanley Kubrick, who took advantage of it to shoot specially risky scenes in
which the integrity of the Arriflex or Mitchell cameras would have been much
more jeopardizing.
Built like a
tank, featuring components made with noble metals and a great level of
machining, the Bell & Howell Eyemo 35 mm movie camera was also through many
decades of the Twentieth Century the motion picture camera par excellence used
not only during the Spanish Civil War, but also throughout the Second World War
and the conflicts of Korea and Vietnam,
thanks to
its huge sturdiness and a guaranteed reliability, even under the most extreme
conditions, since its working is entirely mechanical, with an accuracy
comparable to a Swiss watch and it doesn´t depend on any battery, being wound
with a crank located on the right side of the camera.
Probably the
cinema director having leveraged most the Bell & Howell 35 mm camera was
Stanley Kubrick, who became a great specialist in its handling, using it to
shoot his 16 minute short film Day of the Fight (1951) - filming handheld by
himself with a unit of this model, while his assistant director Alexander
Singer shot with a second Eyemo 35 mm camera on a tripod-, along with two
important thrillers: Killer´s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), and his
feature film Lolita (1962).
GERDA TARO
TURNED INTO AN ACTION PHOTOJOURNALIST
Another side
of seminal significance shown by these images is that Gerda Taro had evolved from being a good photographer using
a medium format 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 square inch Reflex Korelle — discovery made by
Irme Schaber, greatest expert on Gerda Taro on earth — (featuring high technical and aesthetic
standards, following to great extent the precepts of the New Vision School and
its departure from the old tradition of visual perception and depicting, using
compositions with extreme taking angles, often oblique and surprising for the
time, fragmented close-ups, skylines oriented in strange ways and abstracts
forms) into an agile action photojournalist, using a 35 mm Leica rangefinder
camera, moving much faster to get the pictures, and from February 1936
onweards, over aesthetic and compositive concepts, she tried to approach as
much as she could and paid a lot of attention to capture the most decisive
moments.
The images
taken by Gerda Taro in Valsequillo are for example very different to the
pictures got by her almost a year before of militiawomen in Barcelona during
August 1936, and whose focusing in shapes, proportions and style sometimes
resemble abstract images belonging to fashion sphere.
The pictures
taken by Taro in Valsequillo are much more photojournalistic and boast tangible
dynamism, particularly those ones in which it is very apparent the effort made
by the photographer to capture the movements of the farmers carrying out the
phases of sweeping the thrashed grain heaps ( when the dwindled and without
grain underbrush of the thrashed grain heaps -id est, the almost clean grain-
was separated on the ground intended for it ) and the subsequent winnowing for
its cleaning.
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP
New York
They are
peasants from all ages, teenagers, grown up men and old men, conveying a notion
of the harshness of life in countryside during thirties, in which almost every
production stage was manually made.
Taro
photographed them mainly in group, immersed in full toil of the wheat harvest,
although there are some images in which four, three, two and even one people
(picture of the old man clad in dark trousers, white shirt, clear jacket and
black cap with eye shade, who is holding a big wooden pitchfork with his left
hand, grabbing it on its upper area, with the shadow of half of the head of
Gerda Taro visible on the left of the middle of the left lower border of the
image).
There are
some framing errors because of the weariness and sweat, since Gerda Taro fights
to her utmost striving after getting the best feasible pictures, in a difficult
context, with very high temperature.
She has to quickly
move to and fro, and besides, she has been for a lot of minutes inhaling the
inevitable tamo, that´s to say, the very thin dust originated after the
threshing (on cleaning the threshing floor, firstly with the rake, to move what
was heavier, and then, with strong brushes made with ternilla bush), which
penetrates the breathing tract and sticks to the throat, specially during the
sweeping, enhancing thirst and fatigue.
PHOTOJOURNALIST
COMPROMISE IN GERDA TARO
Inevitably,
a question arises: Why this level of effort to get the pictures of as many
peasants as possible in different places, from a number of taking angles,
depicting a wide range of countryside toils, under a scorching sun, and
breathing the tamo?
Photo:
Gerda Taro. © ICP New York
Even, to get
some of the pictures Taro approaches very much, sweating profusely,
photographing from a very low angle with one knee on the ground, swallowing a
lot of dust and little straw pieces, placed under the trajectory of the cereal
while it is being winnowed.
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New
York
What is the
reason for which Gerda Taro is so interested in photographing all of these
peasants in the turning point of the wheat harvest, under such a suffocating
heat and walking across different areas in the west and north of Valsequillo
(Córdoba)?
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New
York
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New
York
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New
York
There are
several reasons for which Gerda Taro fights tooth and nail to get the best
possible pictures (some of them from an amazingly near distance).
Along with
the desire to publish in different illustrated magazines of the time and be
well paid, the main one is linked to her initial photographic background,
inspired by two different scopes: on one hand, the New Vision School as a
surmounting of the traditional visual perception, complemented in Taro with
influences of the Bauhaus, the Soviet Constructivism and Rodchenko´s diagonal
compositions; and on the other hand, her conceptual and social embracement of
the workers photography embodied by the great illustrated magazine AIZ
(Arbeiter Illustrierter Zeitung) from mid twenties, belonging to Willi
Münzenberg´s editorial group, in which also existed Der Arbeiter Fotograf, the
organ of the German workers photographers, without forgetting the fact that through
the Soviet-German exchanges of Münzenberg and Koltsov´s editorial conglomerates
in late twenties and early thirties, Gerda Taro knew well the magazine
Sovetskoe Foto, then the organ of the Soviet photojournalism.
What happens
is that the excellent photographic reportage made by Taro to the peasants of
Valsequillo reaping the wheat crop features unique traits, since the Movemement
of Workers Photography had as a priority to show the ugliness and horror of the
misery, the impoverishment of the masses and the exploitation suffered by the
workers, highly worsened by the downswing 1929 Wall Street and the deep
economical crisis in Germany during the Weimar Republic, so the images taken by
the most prominent photographers of the movemement like Edwin Hoernle, Max
Alpert, Arkady Shaikhet, Eugen Henning, Ernst Thormann, Erich Rinka, Peter
Zimmermann and Albert Henning (whom Gerda Taro had personally met in Leipzig)
depict them, without forgetting some great independent photographers like
Walter Reuter who also made reportages for AIZ and follow that trend, with a
strong component of social improvement and struggle of classes.
Gerda Taro
shared all of those criteria, yearning for betterment in a number of regards,
but besides it, she unfolds her compromise and social convictions in
Valsequillo, giving priority to the concept of land as a source of food and
life and ownership for those working it, conferring prestige both to the hard
work of the peasants in the countryside and the concept of life on it, likewise
endeavouring to photograph and highlight the wide assortment of tools used by
the farmers to fulfill the wheat harvest, of which the one most powerfully
drawing her attention is the classical thresher.
This
approach, leaving an opportunity for hope, is conceptually related to the
reportage called 24 Hours in the Life of a Working Family in Moscow, published
in the September 1931 Number of AIZ magazine, in which the photographers Semion
Tules, Arkady Shaikhet and Max Alpert tried to document with their cameras the
conditions of the daily working activity of the members of the Filipov family
in Moscow and the overcoming of the exploitation, unlike the Family Fournes
Reportage, published by AIZ in December 1931, in which the focus is above all
on the misery of the living conditions of the workers in that time, with a
vision sadly more accurate regarding the usual reality of those moments.
GREAT
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CLASSICAL THRESHER IN THE IMAGES MADE BY GERDA TARO IN
VALSEQUILLO
Photo: Gerda Taro. © ICP New
York
The
classical thresher appears in many of the images taken by Gerda Taro in
Valsequillo, specifically in a total of 28 pictures.
Generally,
the thresher was a thick wooden plank featuring a rectangular shape, made with
several boards, and whose lower surface had a great quantity of sharp little
stones inlaid, often silex chips, and its front bent upwards like a sledge.
Notwithstanding,
the peasants photographed by Gerda Taro in Valsequillo use above all the
typical Andalusian classic thresher, in which the system of cutting by means of
sharp stones was replaced by stainless-steel blades.
The
classical thresher is a very ancient countryside tool, sporting thousands of
year of antiquity and which is drawn by mules or oxen on the parva (the heaps
of unthreshed or unwinnowed grain) spread on a threshing floor, managing to
separate the grain from the straw, because on moving in circles on the spread
harvest, the silex chips or the metallic blades cut the straw and the spike
(which remained between the thresher and the floor of the threshing floor),
separating the seed without damaging it, with the threshed parva being piled
together and prepared for its cleaning through the winnowing technique.
Gerda Taro
moves to and fro, as quickly as possible, photographing the stages of threshing
with the classical threshers (some different kinds of them appear in the
images): the previous putting of the sheaves in the threshing floor, some of
them crammed together in stacks, waiting for their turn, and other ones untied
and spread out in circles, making up the parva which heated in the sun; the
first shift of turns in circles and torcidas with the thresher, several times,
pounding the harvest and turning the parva over with the tornaderas (pitchforks
made from an only wooden piece with some horns).
Photo:
Gerda Taro. © ICP New York
In some of
the photographs made by Gerda Taro we can also see how in some areas the models
of threshers used are the ones known as ´featuring wheels´ or ´cutting ones´,
sporting a series of rollers with transversal metallic blades, to make the
first passing with the threshers, separating the bálago (long straw of the
cereal) of the granzas (cut straw and unpeeled off grain, along with the rest
of brushwood, everything mixed and uncleaned) and how after each passing the
parva is turned taking out the bálago to the borders, raking it and sweeping it
often to prevent it from scattering, keeping the circle of the threshing, and
if possible simultaneously eliminating all the feasible bálago.
Photo:
Gerda Taro. © ICP New York
Likewise,
Gerda Taro makes pictures of the second shift of turns and torcidas (turns with
the shape of eight number) with threshers featuring silex or flintstone chips
finishing to remove the grain from the parva, which is heaped with rakes,
brooms and winnowing forks.
In the same
way, Taro captures with detail how the thressers drawn by mules are linked with
a chain or rawhide belting to a hook located on the forward cleat, and above
all, she pays great attention to the movements and orders made by the
trillique, id est, the driver of the thresher, who is sitting on it, guiding
the mules and also making functions of weight.
SPECIALIZATION
OF GERDA TARO MAKING SEQUENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHS
The images
made in Valsequillo show clearly that Gerda Taro´s style and way of making
pictures have evolved from a working method featuring remarkable affinities
with Eva Besnyö, using a 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 square inch medium format Rolleiflex Old
Standard camera with compositions following the modern aesthetics of twenties,
avant-garde movement, Soviet cinema, together with an influence of the New
Vision set forth by Albert Renger-Paztsch in 1928, until turning into a dynamic
and agile photojournalist, defending her convictions with her camera - in the
same way as Capa-, using a very little and light for the time 35 mm Leica RF
camera, working with two main premises learned from the Hungarian
photojournalist in 1935 and 1936: trying to be at the adequate place in the
best moment and getting the picture, as well as creating photographic essays.
Obviously,
Taro knows the works by Capa, David Seymour "Chim", Agustí Centelles
and other outstanding photographers of the time, exerting influence in her from
early 1937, specially Capa, with whom she has worked for two years, one in
Paris (France) and another one in Spain, but the images prove that Gerda Taro
had already been totally independent for a lot of months, that she had
developed her own style of documentalist photojournalism made with two Leica
cameras with two 5 cm lenses, and above all, the reportage in Valsequillo,
along with other ones made by Taro from mid February 1936, undoubtedly verifies
that her significance in both her photographic production and her quality as a
photojournalist were far superior to what was believed until recent years.
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