Death In The Making

Our photography piece this week is Gerda Taro’s ‘Death in the Making’ exhibition at the ICP.

Born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart, Germany, Gerda was raised by middle-class Jewish parents emigrated from Galicia during WWI. Her family would later move to Leipzig in 1929, four years before Hitler’s election as chancellor. Shortly after the Nazi’s rise to power, Gerda was arrested for distributing anti-fascist leaflets around the city, forcing her to flee to Paris.

While there, she met Jewish-Hungarian photographer Andre Friedmann. She became enthralled with his practice and began to work as his assistant and later partner (and lover).

Together, they would sell their photographs under the pseudonym of Robert Capa – an imagined American photojournalist under who’s guise they could drive up the price of their work and industry repute. The plan worked, and they became prominent photojournalists within the Paris press space, despite their obscurity and immigrant status.

Amid their success, they travelled to Barcelona to cover the Spanish Civil War, two-and-a-half weeks after it broke out. One of the first stories they covered was the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, a group of militiawomen training on the beach. Using a Rollei camera to distinguish her squared photographs from Capa’s Leica images, Gerda incorporated dynamic camera angles to photograph her subjects, a technique signature to the New Vision movement.  

Closely tied to Bauhaus, the movement originated shortly after the Great War. In the aftermath of this “mechanised” conflict, it aimed to view the world “solely through the camera lens”, and thus capture the innate expression and power held in everyday reality. The camera was seen as a mirror into the soul of the new industrial age. This can be seen in Gerda’s image of a militiawoman knelt wielding a gun. Shot from the ground, the image encapsulates a physical and emotional closeness to the subject that epitomises Gerda’s role as a “vehicle of modern consciousness”. Her first-hand accounts of the violence are captured with such simplicity and sincerity that they emote a visceral response in conveying the reality of conflict. Her commitment to throwing herself into the heart of the action would result in her own death at the age of 26, when she was crushed by a tank on the frontline amidst the chaos of a Republican retreat. 

Sources

https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/45267/1/the-films-that-influenced-cindy-shermans-untitled-film-stills-series

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/56520?artist_id=5392&page=1&sov_referrer=artist

https://magazine.artland.com/portraits-of-america-cindy-shermans-untitled-film-stills/

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artwork-changed-life-cindy-shermans-untitled-film-stills

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sherman-untitled-film-still-48-p1151