When I saw the first few photos in Gerda Taro’s exhibit at the International Center of Photography in New York (now showing through January 6, 2008), I was especially taken by one that is rather famous. It shows a woman in training to fight for the Republican forces in The Spanish Civil War.
Fought in the years between 1936 and 1939, this was a conflict won by the right-wing insurgent forces of General Francisco Franco, the loser being the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic. It was the one war that the fascists won, and General Franco was able to weather World War II, in which his cohorts Mussolini and Hitler met their fates at such considerable cost to the rest of the world. The fascist dictator Franco ruled Spain until his death in 1975.
The Spanish Civil War was one of the saddest of all — a notable disaster for every single Spaniard — although it was a small war by comparison to what was to come. When you read about it in books like The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, or the extraordinary Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, you learn of the amazing heartlessness of and the terrible atrocities committed by all the forces involved. The murder that the Spanish visited on each other was extremely cold-blooded, in which even members of individual families were sometimes at chilling odds with each other.
Republican militiawoman training on the beach, outside Barcelona, August 1936. Photo: Gerda Taro
Taro’s photograph shows a remarkably fashionable-looking young woman, down on one knee, wielding a handgun at some invisible enemy. She’s in profile, and there is a kind of authoritative majesty about her, machismo that is made even more effective for me by the short heels she is wearing. It is the heels and her youthful beauty that make her seem fashionable. Yet I would not care to compliment her on all that because I fear she’d turn on me with the pistol and fire away at my attempt at charm.
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