Gerta Pohorylle,
1st August, 1910
I’m sorely tempted to begin the 6th Roman month of Sextilis with someone Roman, like Augustus maybe, after whom August was named. But he was born in September, so that wouldn’t work. Sextilis was the 6th month until 153BC when the start of the year was changed to January. In Roman Egypt, they used another calendar system altogether and the start of the Egyptian year was roughly in September and it was called Thoth. In honor of Augustus, they changed Thoth to…umm… August, meaning that you could wander around the Roman empire and have two Augusts, which was cool if you had a birthday in August.
Claudius was born the 1st of August, making him the ideal subject of something like this, but I’ve got quite a lot to say about Claudius, particularly regarding his historical image as a stammering, bumbling fool, so I need more space to take that particular narrative apart.
So instead, we’re shooting ahead to humanity’s bloodiest and stupidest century, the 20th, and the world of war photography.
If someone said the words ‘war photographer’, most people would probably think of the name Robert Capa. Capa took some of the most famous war images of all time, including a famous series taken during the D-Day landings and Death of a Loyalist Soldier, taken during the Spanish Civil war. There are some suggestions that the latter was staged, but even so, it’s one of the most famous war images ever taken.
Fewer people, however, would have heard of Capa’s companion and professional partner, Gerda Taro, or that some of the images credited to Robert Capa were actually taken by her. Even fewer will know that not only did she work with Robert Capa, for a period she was ‘Robert Capa’.
Gerta Pohorylle was born on 1 August 1910 in Stuttgart, Germany, to Gisela Boral and Heinrich Pohorylle, a middle-class Jewish family. She attended boarding school in Lausanne and later attended a business college.
In 1929, the family moved to Leipzig and when the Nazis came to power, Gerta became involved in left-wing politics. In 1933, she was arrested for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. Fearing Nazi reprisals, the whole Pohorylle family fled in different directions. Her brother went to the UK, her parents fled to Mandatory Palestine and Gerta made for Paris. She would never see any of them again.
It was in Paris in 1934 that she met the photojournalist Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, and became his personal assistant. He taught her photography and they fell in love. In October 1935, she began working as a picture editor at the Alliance Photo agency and began to study photography as a way of legalizing her stay in France. One of the best ways for Jewish immigrants to obtain visas to remain in France was to become and accredited photojournalist and in February 1936, she was given accreditation by the ABC Press-Service agency in Amsterdam, allowing her to gain residency in France.
It was then that Gerta and Endre devised a plan to be the agents of an American photographer they named ‘Robert Capa’. Gerta tried to introduce pictures by the fictious Capa to the Alliance agency in the hope of boosting royalties, but they recognized Endre’s work and gave them a lower starting fee of 1,100 francs a month.
Both of them took photographs which they sold under the name of Capa, a name they invented to sound more American. They hoped that by choosing an American sounding name, they could avoid the political and religious intolerance their joint Jewish heritage provoked and also make selling in the lucrative American market more viable. They chose ‘Capa’ from Endre’s nickname as a child, Cápa, Hungarian for ‘shark’, while Gerta changed her professional name to Gerda Taro after the Japanese artist Tarō Okamoto and Swedish actress Greta Garbo.
When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, the pair travelled to Barcelona to cover the fighting and it was in Spain that Taro acquired the nickname of La pequeña rubia "The little blonde". All the pictures they took were issued under the alias of Robert Capa, although it was possible to tell their work apart as Taro used a Rollei camera which made square format photographs while Capa produced rectangular pictures using a Leica camera.
Despite being tied to Endre under the Robert Capa banner, she maintained her independence. She refused Endre’s proposal of marriage and became close to the intellectual and academic anti-fascist movement that included people like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway. She signed a deal to publish for France’s Ce Soir magazine under her own name and started her own commercial operation, Photo Taro.
She recorded the extensive bombing of Valencia on her own and in 1937 was covering the Brunete region near Madrid for Ce Soir. Nationalists had claimed the region, however it was Taro’s reporting that made it clear to the world that the Republican forces were still in charge.
She was covering the retreat of the Republican Army from the Battle of Brunete when she jumped onto the back of a passing staff car, carrying wounded soldiers. An article from Le Soir on Tuesday 27th July, 1937, reports what happened.
During the fighting at Brunete on Sunday [25 July] Mlle. Taro rallied a retreating group of militia, and persuaded them to return to occupy one of the trenches, where they withstood an intense bombardment for an hour. When forced to retreat, Mlle. Taro jumped on the running board of a car. An insurgent tank rushing up to the lines emerged suddenly from a side road and collided with the car. Mlle. Taro was rushed to hospital at Escorial seriously hurt and given blood transfusion, but died yesterday morning.
Gerda Taro died on the 26th of July, 1937.
Taro had ignored warnings from Endre and others, to stay away from the frontline at one of the most dangerous moments in the war and, having used up all her film, had hitched a ride on the running boards of a general’s car that was being used to ferry the injured. As they were strafed by German aircraft supporting Franco’s troops near Villanueva de la Cañada, an out-of-control tank from the republican army ran into them and she was mortally wounded in the stomach.
She was still alive and conscious when she arrived at the British hospital in El Escorial, however, where she was operated on by the New Zealand surgeon Dr Douglas Jolly – but she died that night.
In the end, Taro had become too involved in the Republican cause and too caught up in the notion of being a star photographer to heed the risks. The Republican soldiers adored her and she kept pushing and taking too many risks; the star photographer with an idealistic cause.
It was that idealism that made her such a star in the anti-fascist movement and on August 1st, 1937, on what would have been her 27th birthday, she was given a grand funeral in Paris, paid for the by French Communist Party. Tens of thousands attended.
She was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and her epitaph reads:
So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world
In both French and Catalan.
It’s hard to not assume that Gerda Taro’s light was somewhat shadowed by that of Robert Capa, but the reality is that, for a while at least, it suited them both and allowed them to forge independent careers that perhaps they would never have been able to achieve otherwise. Her work was equally as good as Endre’s and there was nobody around at the time to sort through the various pictures and pick them apart. Her legacy remains not only in the photographs she took, but in her steadfast commitment to the anti-fascist cause at a time when the world was seemingly turning its face the other way.
After her death, Endre used the pseudonym Robert Capa full time and became one of the most famous photographers of all time, founding the Magnum Picture Agency with, among others, Henri Cartier-Bresson. He was covering the first Indochina War in 1954, travelling through Thái Bình Province, when he died after stepping on a landmine.