Eyes of the World Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention of Modern Photojournalism

by Desconhecido

  MAY 25: Capa steps on land mine in Indochina, dies

  1955

  The Family of Man photography exhibit opens in New York

  1975

  Franco dies; Juan Carlos, grandson of Alfonso XIII, becomes king of Spain; new era of reform begins

  2007

  Mexican Suitcase is recovered

  2010

  International Center of Photography exhibits images from Mexican Suitcase

  2011

  Civil war begins in Syria; some scholars see echoes of the Spanish Civil War (see Appendix C)

  2016

  Eightieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War

  2017

  Seventieth anniversary of Magnum

  HOW WE CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK

  MARC

  I GREW UP surrounded by stories of the Spanish Civil War. My father often took me to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where Picasso’s Guernica occupied an entire wall. The painter would not allow it to be shown in Spain so long as Franco was alive, and I saw it many times. Each visit was a reminder of the horror of the assault on that town, the genius of the painter, and the long shadow of the lost war.

  In school, the war came even closer. For many of the adults I knew, including my friends’ parents and my teachers, standing against Franco and then being viewed with suspicion in America as so-called premature antifascists were vivid experiences. Indeed, my high school math teacher, Sol Birnbaum, had been a proud member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. We all knew that and admired him for it. Sol was a short but fit man who sported a black beret, perhaps a fashion statement from his days overseas. His view of the world was shaped in Spain, and he had done research that our government wanted but that he refused to share, since he did not agree with its policies.

  In tenth grade, our Spanish teacher was a beautiful young Spanish woman who wore black leather boots. For all the boys, she symbolized the dark intensity of her homeland. And then the following year, with a new teacher, we began to read the works of Federico García Lorca. I fell in love with his haunting, passionate dreams-in-words. I cannot say strongly enough what a treasure he is—try the “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” or “Romance Sonambulo.” At least view one of the many YouTube videos. But there is the greatest joy in speaking—and even memorizing—his resonant Spanish words that are both aching love and heart-stopping nightmare.

  Spain and its civil war were about passion, death, tragedy, loss—and near at hand. For Whom the Bell Tolls was a book I was pleased to read in order to be part of the adult conversation. But I also read and loved books by John Dos Passos. (Nineteen Nineteen is a treat!) As I got older, I began to hear the stories of the fate of his translator, and of how Stalin subverted and infiltrated the Left. The whole tragedy of Spain began to seem like a myth I had too eagerly accepted. It was the story a generation before me told, full of their nostalgia, their regret. It was as if I had grown up wearing old clothes, and I now realized I could take them off, could choose my own fashion. Spain was their fight; it did not mean anything to me.

  Working on Eyes of the World, though, changed the story for me once again. Rereading Hemingway and Orwell—and for the first time the Spanish Civil War writings of authors such as Langston Hughes, Josephine Herbst, Gustav Regler, and Alvah Bessie—and looking at the photos with Marina, I felt for the first time, for myself, what Spain had meant. I didn’t have to squint and ignore Stalin—I veered off to study the history of his murders (which included members of my family) in detail. But I discovered the feeling we tried to capture in this book: the “thrill of hope” Orwell described, that sense of being young, having no past, no home, nothing to lose, and a vision of doing right, fighting evil, the desperate need to build a better future. Spain was, for a moment, hope, an ideal, a place where young people could plant their dreams.

  Today we read dystopian novels and perhaps fight for environmental, social, or economic causes. We, too, have our dreams. May Spain guide us—not just to prepare for the challenges, and even defeats, ahead, but to recall the force, the power, of its yearning. The Republic fell to Franco and his long dictatorship. But he, too, passed. The multiracial ideals of the inter-national utopians are now our commonplace reality. Dreams matter.

  MARINA: “THE MAIL SLOT”

  WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I would wait eagerly for the mail to arrive, listening for the thunk of envelopes and magazines dropping through the brass slot into our foyer. What I waited for most was Life magazine.

  Then I would lie belly down on the living room rug and slowly, slowly make my way through the magazine, start to finish. I loved the ripple of its oversized pages, the oily scent of ink. Most of all, I loved how a news story rolled out before me, photo after photo, in a muscular wave. First I would let the images flow all at once, riffling past in a sequence, like a film. Then I would go back, pause, pore over a single image, study its details. Some photographs walloped me so hard, I came to a trembling stop.

  That’s what happened when I saw the first photos taken right after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on a motel balcony in April 1968. I had already heard the news, of course, on the television. But my brain kept seizing up, trying to make sense of the astonishing fact that Dr. King, the round-faced man whom so many adults adored and admired, was dead. I was looking at a picture taken the instant after he had been shot. The picture showed his aides, pointing at a window across the motel courtyard. Death caught and stilled. How could I, a little girl, be let in on this momentous event? It seemed both obscene and right.

  Other images scared me, especially those from Vietnam: the Buddhist monk who burned himself; the naked girl running down a road, arms outstretched, seared by napalm; helicopters tilting out of burning villages; the sinister stillness of the Mekong River; the college student on her knees at Kent State, a friend sprawled dead on the ground.

  As I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, the world was rushing in, stirring me deeper into America’s shimmering, urgent events. The Vietnam War, civil rights, integration battles, assassinations, the breakdown of New York City, the feminist movement, all surged around us and blared in headlines and on the television. These events were like electricity zapping in the air, debated nightly at dinner tables, out on porches, at neighborhood gatherings and parties. But I was young; it was my brother’s friends who were of draft age and marched against the war; it was my father who went off to teach in public schools beset with bomb threats and protests. I did not understand all this fully. Photographs helped me make sense of the rush of news that breached my home and overwhelmed me.

  News was part of my everyday fare. I woke up every morning hearing the snap-snap sound of my mother turning the pages of the New York Times as she read. By third grade, my teacher, Miss Citrin, told us that we must read one article a week and write up a report for Friday current events. I pasted my New York Times articles in my blue loose-leaf binder—thin strips of news about the Cold War, the Soviet Union, or protests at local city colleges. To this day, I cannot wake up and feel my brain’s muscles go into motion without reading the newspaper.

  Photos, though, were different; they rearranged something vital inside me. They transformed the flat, noisy headlines, the epic political events that were heaving across our globe, and made them understandable. For a little girl, they turned the big and frightening into the intimate. There was safety in going toward those stills, taking in each image at my own pace, thumb and forefinger on the page’s edge. In a strange way, those photo spreads gave me control: page by page, I could let out the throttle of fear, just so, before taking in the next image.

  There is something both private and public in a news photo; it is an exchange between you and figures and events that are remote—the unknown soldier who is wounded on a battlefield, or Coretta Scott King at Dr. King’s funeral, veil covering her eyes. You are being let in on a private, unguarded moment that is also shared by millions. I stared at Coretta Scott King’s daughter, her face scrunched up into her mother’s c
hest, and saw a girl like me. Her neat ribbons and carefully parted hair, her stiff white dress. That terrible event came down to my size. I was allowed in.

  I did not know then that as I paged through Life magazine, I was absorbing a way of seeing invented by a small band of young photographers decades before, during the Spanish Civil War. Photography was their calling, fusing with the ideals and fervor of their times. It was their legacy that shaped me. At some point, I became aware of Magnum and those original images from Spain, but it is not an exact memory. It’s as if they were always there: the classic faces, the strong, molding light. They were a foundation of seeing. In the magazines of my childhood—Life, Look, National Geographic, The Family of Man catalog—I was seeing versions of Capa and Taro and Chim everywhere.

  I realize that in an age of digital manipulation, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook feeds, and avant-garde photo installations, my ideas of photography might seem a little old fashioned. In fact, there are photographers who rebelled against Magnum and the photojournalism tradition, calling it “pious humanism.” They did not believe that a photograph could teach or change the world. But for me, strong images never lose their power.

  Writing the story of Capa and Taro was like going back to my origins. And yet their story was more heartbreaking, more moving and urgent than I ever realized. Each tour through the photographs, each detail in the ups and downs of their survival, each example of their sheer bravery, brought me fresh amazement and grief. I know I can never be as courageous and reckless as Capa and Taro, or any of the other great photographers who have followed. Seeing their photos, I can only be grateful for their willingness to put themselves on the line in pursuit of the story, of the right image. For letting me travel with them, to see all that happened. Capa, Taro, and their friend Chim were optimistic; they were fearless and canny—and they were most of all young, oh so young. And they brought to me—a little girl growing up decades later—a way to see and understand my complicated, difficult world.

  COLLABORATION

  ONE OF THE REASONS we wanted to write about Capa and Taro is because they were an artistic couple who worked together as equals. Of course, we are also a couple, are both writers, and have a lot of experience in collaborating. At several points in the book, we envisioned how they experienced that creative exchange. Where do those passages come from? Research, photos, and our own experience.

  Neither Capa nor Taro left self-reflective diaries, and only a few of their letters have survived. We are left with how others saw them, the chronology of their relationship and work life, and their photos. Every researcher interested in Capa and Taro tries to make sense of each beat of their relationship. What did copain mean to her? To him? Was she pulling away at the end? If so, was that because she so valued her independence that, even if she loved him, she needed marriage to come later, when she would not be in his shadow? Was she more committed to the Left, and he to photography? Later Capa did become a ladies’ man; even the Hollywood beauty Ingrid Bergman could not get him to settle down. Was that because he was heartbroken over Taro? Or did Taro sense that he would stray, and so she refused to attach? We have made use of others’ ideas, especially Irme Schaber’s deep research on these questions. But ultimately our interest is less in the unknowable shifts in their relationship than in their experience as artistic partners. And to understand that, we ventured to speculate based on our own experiences.

  What is collaboration? What are the challenges, the rewards? What makes it work?

  MARC

  I WAS, YOU MIGHT SAY, the product of artistic collaboration. My father, Boris, was a well-established New York set designer. Theater work, especially for a set designer, is inherently collaborative. Designing a stage set is not making a poster; it is creating a space that comes alive when it is used. My mother’s part in this process involved not just designs but people.

  My mother, Lisa, had grown up in Europe, where her father was a musical conductor. The composers with whom he worked were the experimental modernists Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. They were each ferociously talented, but equally competitive and self-assertive. My grandfather had the gift of wit and charm and managed to smooth the way among them.

  My mother grew up surrounded by discussions and rehearsals in and around whatever apartment they occupied. She studied scenic design and, in America, became my father’s assistant. Before they were a couple, they were artists together—sort of. In Playbills, my father always received sole billing, with my mother hidden on one of the last pages, listed under her maiden name as Mr. Aronson’s assistant. But every director, producer, and actor knew that they were partners—not only in crafting scenic designs (she built many of the models) but in doing what her own father had done: negotiating the mammoth egos of the theater world (my father’s included) to allow the individual stars to function as a creative team.

  My parents worked at home; their studio was the front room of our Upper West Side apartment. Work went on in one form or another all the time, every day of the year. There were clashes between my parents, and friction with visiting guests. I heard the sharp edges of artistic firefights. I saw famous directors, actors, producers, and authors sit together—argue, show off, and dispute, but also sparkle, challenge, and inspire one another. And I saw designs take shape—from a sketch my father might make late at night, to a small model my mother built, to a larger model crafted by an assistant, to a meeting with a director about revisions, to the scenic studio where drawings became drops and models turned into buildings, to a stage where my parents’ images became a world brought to life in a play.

  I began my own career in book publishing as an editor: the most collaborative job. In one way, an editor is there to assist an author or artist, to help that creator be his or her best. In another, the editor stands between the creators and the publishing house, which has its own social anthropology, its own layers of power, status, hierarchy, as well as its own governing requirements, such as deadlines, cost, and income. I love editing, but I am also now an author. And as an author, I have shared the writing process on seven of my books. Even Marina and I were initially author and editor on one previous Holt book (Marina’s Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers.) From art to marriage—like my parents.

  I think collaboration comes down to two essentials. First, honesty. When any of us works in a group, there is a get-along–go-along, you-scratch-my-back–I’ll-scratch-yours impulse. If I don’t criticize you too much—which becomes especially appealing when you work with someone you live with—you won’t be too hard on me. Harsh criticism can carry a real emotional price. But you must be committed to what you are creating. The something that you are bringing into the world together must be larger than your fear, your ego, your momentary peace. You must care most about the goal: making your art the best it can be. Anything you choose to ignore may very well be exactly what others will notice. Your obligation is to creation, not calm. Of course, this also means you have to be able to listen and adjust to apt criticism of your own work.

  The second essential might seem like the opposite of the first, for it is the ability to fall in love, to be swept away by what your partner has created. You must be a fan, an enthusiast, an encourager who can swoon over a decision that replaces something ordinary with something inspired. You cannot be rigid; you have to be mobile when your partner leads beyond what you could create on your own.

  When an artistic relationship has honesty and mutual passion, you together can craft works that are new, that give the world depth, beauty, insight. That birth is so rewarding, so satisfying, so fundamentally true—even as one is said to “true” a plank of wood, or a bicycle wheel—that all the aggravation disappears. You delight in each other, and in your art.

  In speculating about several moments when Capa and Taro worked together, shot together, traveled together, we tried to imagine and describe that experience of delight.

  MARINA: “COULD”

  WHEN I WAS IN MY TWENTIES,
I spent a lot of time alone. At that time, I was in graduate school, living a Spartan existence, all my energy fused to learning the craft of writing. I felt so guilty about quitting my salaried job that I told myself I must treat writing like a job. I lived in a tiny studio apartment and sat at my small table and wrote, every day. I was fierce about my solitude.

  Just beyond my elbow, through the window, lay the driveway of a big Victorian house where a young couple and their children lived. Every day, while I made coffee and sat down to write, I could hear the messy tumble of family life, voices shouting, their Subaru backing into the street. I hardened my heart and pressed into the page. That life—marriage, work, children—seemed impossible for me.

  By the time I emerged a few years later, I wondered whether marriage would force me to leave that most central passion, the one that animated me and got me up every day. My ideal literary couple was Virginia and Leonard Woolf—I loved how they had created Hogarth Press together, how he nursed her through her difficulties as an artist.

  One day, I came upon a quote in a memoir of the American author Mary McCarthy. She wrote of her marriage to the critic Edmund Wilson, which, by all accounts, wasn’t very good, mostly because he drank too much. But she still wrote appreciatively of why she had decided to marry him: that he cared not for what she was but what she could be. That idea—what she could be—lodged in me like a hot coal. That’s what I must find in a partner.

  So often when we think of romance or dating, we hope we look good and put on our best face. But in a way, finding a partner is not about who you are now. It’s finding someone who can see your potential—even if it’s not totally apparent to you. A partnership is not about the present but the future. All the coulds—what you could do on your own and together—begin to shimmer as real possibilities.