Gerda Taro

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Gerda Taro in Spain, July 1937

Gerda Taro (real name Gerta Pohorylle ; born August 1, 1910 in Stuttgart , † July 26, 1937 in El Escorial , Spain ) was a German photographer . Together with her partner Robert Capa, she documented the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War , making her the first woman to take photos on a war front.

life and work

Gerta Pohorylle was the eldest daughter of the Jewish merchant Heinrich Pohorylle, who immigrated from Eastern Galicia , and his wife Gisela. She spent her childhood and youth mainly in Stuttgart. In 1929 the family moved to Leipzig where Gerta Pohorylle the reform educationally oriented Gaudigschule visited and socialist joined groups.

Gerda Taro: Robert Capa in the Spanish Civil War, 1937

She took part in leaflet campaigns against the National Socialists , was arrested in March 1933, but released again after almost two weeks. Shortly afterwards she went into exile in France with her friend Ruth Cerf . In the late autumn of 1933 she reached Paris . There she met the Hungarian photographer Endre Ernö Friedmann (Robert Capa, nickname André) in September 1934 and soon after became his student and partner.

In order to increase her chances of earning income from her artistic work and to get better commissions, Gerta Pohorylle proposed to work under a pseudonym : André Friedman (also of Jewish descent) became Robert Capa for marketing reasons , Gerta Pohorylle chose the name Gerda for herself Taro. Gerda Taro's first press card was issued by an Amsterdam photo agency and is dated February 4, 1936.

Grave of Gerda Taro in the Pere Lachaise cemetery (Paris)

When the military coup in Spain on July 18, 1936 kept the world in suspense, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa decided - like many other intellectuals - to go to Spain to document the civil war. They were in Barcelona on August 5th, 1936 . In the months that followed, Taro and Capa photographed the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War from the Republican side for various international newspapers.

On July 25, 1937, during an attack by the German Condor Legion near Villanueva de la Cañada on the Brunete Front , Gerda Taro was run over by a Republican tank after she had slipped off a footboard of a truck that was being used to flee the combat region. One day later she died of her injuries in the English hospital in El Escorial, where she was still being operated on. When she was buried on August 1, 1937 in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, thousands followed her coffin. The funeral procession, led by Pablo Neruda and Louis Aragon , became a demonstration against fascism . The tomb for Taro created by Alberto Giacometti has only survived in a greatly modified form.

estate

Shortly after Taro's death, photos she had taken on the Brunete front appeared in the American magazine Life under the title The Spanish War Kills Its First Woman Photographer .

Since the early 1990s, the author and cultural scientist Irme Schaber has been making the life and work of Gerda Taro known to the public again.

In 2007 a sensational photo find attracted attention. In Mexico , a suitcase with thousands of picture negatives appeared that had previously been considered lost. The find, which made headlines under the label The Mexican Suitcase and which disappeared during the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, contained - in addition to - in some cases already published - originals attributed to Capa, numerous other pictures by Gerda Taro and David Seymour , a Polish photojournalist, who had worked closely with Taro and Capa in Spain. History, photography and photojournalism experts assessed the resurfaced images as an important document of the close collaboration between Taro and Capa. The rediscovered oeuvre has been presented in numerous exhibitions (including in Bilbao , Yokohama and Paris ) and extracts have also been published in printed form.


Honors

  • In Leipzig, a street in the south-eastern suburb has been named Tarostraße in honor of Gerda Taro since 1970 .
Gerda-Taro-Platz in Stuttgart-Mitte, sculpture by Erich Hauser
  • In October 2008, the green space between Hohenheimer / Dannecker- and Alexanderstraße was renamed Gerda-Taro-Platz in Stuttgart . This was extensively redesigned in 2014 after long controversies and finally reopened in November of the same year.
  • In Robert Cohen's novel Exile of Cheeky Women (2009) she appears as a literary character.
  • Gerda Taro was dedicated to the song Taro on the album An Awesome Wave (2012) by the British band alt-J, which tells their story and the story of Robert Capa.
  • On June 28, 2018, the newly built grammar school on Telemannstrasse in Leipzig was named Gerda-Taro-Schule.
  • For her 108th birthday in 2018, she was honored by the search engine Google with a worldwide doodle .
  • The city of Paris named a street Rue Gerda-Taro in the 13th arrondissement of Paris in 2019 .

Exhibitions

Since many of her recordings were ascribed to Robert Capa, the first specially designed exhibition was dedicated to Gerda Taro's oeuvre only 70 years after her death.

7th International Photography Festival F / STOP , Leipzig, with photos by Taro
  • 7th International Festival for Photography Leipzig , June 25, 2016 to July 3, 2016, participation.
    The 7th International Photography Festival F / STOP 2016 in Leipzig presented the exhibits as photo panels for the first time in public space. Photos of Gerda Taro and Capa were also shown in an installation on Straße des 18. Oktober . On the night of August 3rd to 4th, strangers painted over the photo boards with black tar paint. The Association of Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936–1939 e. V. (KFSR) said that Gerda Taro “died for the second time” in Leipzig in 2016. On September 19, 2016, the exhibition of the photo panels was shown again in Straße des 18. Oktober .

literature

  • Juan L. Fusi Aizpúrua et al. a. (Ed.): Capa, cara a cara. Fotografías de Robert Capa sobre la Guerra Civil espanola de la Colección del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores . Museo Nacional, Madrid 1999, ISBN 0-89381-831-3 , (annotated photo book).
  • Kati Horna: Fotografías de la Guerra Civil espanola (1937–1938) . Ministerio de Cultura, Salamanca 1992, ISBN 84-7483-854-1 , photo book.
  • Alex Kershaw : Robert Capa, the photographer of war (OT: Blood and champagne. ) Ullstein, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-550-07607-X .
  • François Maspero : L'Ombre d'une photographe. Gerda Taro . Seuil, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-02-085817-7 .
  • Irme Schaber, Richard Whelan, Kristen Lubben (eds.): Gerda Taro . Steidl, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-86521-532-7 .
  • Irme Schaber: Gerta Taro. Photo reporter in the Spanish Civil War. A biography . Jonas Verlag, Marburg 1994, ISBN 3-89445-175-0 ; New edition: Gerda Taro - photo reporter. With Robert Capa in the Spanish Civil War. The biography. Jonas Verlag, Marburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-89445-466-1 .
  • Irme Schaber:  Taro, Gerda. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-11206-7 , p. 790 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Bernd Serger, Karin Anne Böttcher: There were Jews in Reutlingen. A historical reader . Reutlingen City Archives, Reutlingen 2005, ISBN 3-933820-67-7 , pp. 142–150.
  • Marie-Loup Sougez, Albert-Louis Deschamps (Ed.): Fotógrafo en la Guerra Civil Espanola . Junta de Castilla y Léon, Salamanca 2003, ISBN 84-97181-69-7 , (annotated photo book).
  • Amanda Vaill: Hotel Florida. Truth, Love and Treason in the Spanish Civil War. Translated from the English by Susanne Held. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-60894-915-5 .
  • Cynthia Young (Ed.): The Legendary Spanish Civil War Negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour. Steidl Verlag , Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-86930-141-9 , (English).
  • Helena Janeczek : The girl with the Leica (novel). Berlin Verlag, 2020, ISBN 978-3827013989

Movie

  • Love at work - Gerda Taro & Robert Capa. (OT: L'amour à l'œuvre - Gerda Taro et Robert Capa. ) Documentary, France, 2019, 26:22 min., Written and directed: Stéphanie Colaux and Delphine Deloget, Bonne Compagnie, arte , series: Liebe am Werk (OT: L'amour à l'œuvre. Couples mythiques d'artistes ), first broadcast: April 14, 2019 on arte, table of contents by ARD , online.

Web links

Commons : Gerda Taro  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Biographies

Portraits

photos

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Amrai Coen : "Because you are only a woman." (3): The eye of freedom. In: Die Zeit , February 1, 2014.
  2. ↑ Exile archive: Gerta Taro. In: exilarchiv.de , accessed on January 30, 2014.
  3. ↑ Collection Capa: Tomb of Gerda Taro at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. In: Magnum Photos , accessed May 14, 2019.
  4. ↑ Irme Schaber: Gerda Taro. Photo reporter . Jonas Verlag, Marburg 2013, p. 229 ff. Schaber refers to Casimiro Di Crescenzo for the authorship of Alberto Giacometti: La tomba di Gerta Taro: un lavoro inedito di Alberto Giacometti. In: Riga , Monza 1991, volume 1, issue 1, p. 257-261.
  5. ^ Mark Zuehlke, The Gallant Cause. Canadians in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 , ISBN 978-0-470-83926-3 , pp. 163-166.
  6. ↑ Gabriele Katz: Stuttgart's strong women . Theiss, Darmstadt 2015, p. 195 .
  7. ^ Andreas Holzer: Capa, Taro, Chim: Photo reporter in the Spanish Civil War. In: Photo History , 2011, issue 121.
  8. ↑ Jürgen Lessat: Hohenheimerstraße: More attention to Gerda Taro. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten , August 18, 2012.
  9. ↑ Nina Eyerle: Opening: Mayor Kuhn calls for more memorials. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , November 21, 2014.
  10. ↑ Anne Waak : On the way with Alt-J: The band that nobody loved. In: Spex , August 11, 2013.
  11. ↑ Leipzig high school bears the name of Gerda Taro. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung (LVZ), June 28, 2018.
  12. ↑ The school on Telemannstrasse is now called the Gerda Taro School. In: City of Leipzig , June 28, 2018.
  13. ^ Gerda Taro: Google doodle for the 108th birthday of the German photographer in the Spanish Civil War. In: GoogleWatchBlog , July 31, 2018.
  14. ^ City of Paris: Paris Council. Accessed in 2019 (French).
  15. ^ Exhibition: Gerda Taro. In: International Center of Photography , 2007/08.
  16. ^ Exhibition: Gerda Taro. Focus on war. In: Kunstmuseum Stuttgart , 2010.
  17. ↑ Evelyn ter Vehn: Fotofestival f / stop: reports by Capa and Taro for the first time in the city of Leipzig. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung , June 23, 2016, interview with curator Jan Wenzel.
  18. ↑ Jürgen Kleindienst: Information boards on the life and work of Gerda Taro painted over with black paint. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung , August 5, 2016.
  19. ↑ Declaration of KFSR 1936-1939 eV: Gerda Taro after 1937 for the second time died - in Leipzig 2016th
  20. ↑ Evelyn ter Vehn: Crowdfunding successful - After the tar attack in Leipzig: Gerda Taro photos can be seen again from Monday. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung , September 15, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Taro, Gerda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pohorylles, Gerda (real name); Taro, Gerta
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1937
Place of death El Escorial , Spain