Saturday, September 22, 2007

Lovely Antifascist


GerdaTaroSlide2.jpg
Originally uploaded by Doctor Noe
What is amazing to me about this person is that she lived in a time when everything was possible. See the three listings below. ...

"Gerda Taro, Guadalajara Front, Spain," July 1937, by an unknown photographer.

Photo: International Center of Photography

Related Article: A Wartime Photographer in Her Own Light (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/arts/design/22taro.html)

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Now playing: Paul McCartney - All Things Must Pass
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GerdaTaro: Premature Anti-Fascist Icon Lady


GerdaTaroSlide1.jpg
Originally uploaded by Doctor Noe
Gerda Taro began her short, adventurous life as Gerta Pohorylle, a Jewess born in Poland.Sometime in the spring of 1936, she and her lover André Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, who took the name Robert Capa, changed their names and, in the process, the history of photography. Ms. Pohorylle became Gerda Taro. Working at times as “Capa,” an imaginary American photographer, they began documenting the Spanish Civil War, capturing the ruined towns and devastated civilians and soldiers on the Republican side.

Gerda Taro - Republican Bugle Boy


GerdaTaroSlide10.jpg
Originally uploaded by Doctor Noe
This series of photos (see the next three blog entries) took me back to an adolescent obsession triggered by George Orwell's most amazing Homage to Catalonia, his tale of the revolutionary atmosphere that pervade Spanish Civil War-era Barcelona and its environs. The streets were teeming with anarchism and good vibrations, powered by the common struggle to off the Fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. For this, Taro, her husband Robert Capa and the sainted Brooklyn soldiers of the Lincoln Brigade were anointed "premature antifascists" by the Hoover-led FBI and its successors in the Great American Witch Hunt, the House Unamerican Activities Committee and McCarthyism.

War Portraitist With a Cause

Gerda Taro, who died young, is only now being honored by the International Center of Photography in New York. See above and link at right for more ... (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/arts/design/22taro.html?ex=1348200000&en=3ccb5a5546f4abe1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink)