The Jewish-German photojournalist Gerda Taro’s brief life was filled with firsts. She is widely considered to have been the first woman photographer assigned to the frontlines and, unfortunately, the first to die on assignment. Today would have marked her 108th birthday, and Google is celebrating her considerable legacy with a doodle on its homepage. Taro,…
Ever since the camera became a pervasive technology we have lived in a world of images, a world in which we make sense of events through their representations – the image is more immediate than the written word and more mutually intelligible than sound (though we see the camera as the primary means of recording and…
Most photographs of the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau are configured in landscape views. But when Elliott Erwitt photographed the tracks leading through the building at the camp’s entrance in 1964, he created a vertically-oriented image, devoting nearly two-thirds of the photograph to the train tracks. Had Erwitt turned his camera 90 degrees to capture the entire…
The Hungarian Jewish photographer Eva Besnyö (1910-2003) deserves an honored place beside her more widely celebrated compatriots Robert Capa and André Kertész. A Berlin exhibit honoring her, Eva Besnyö: Budapest – Berlin – Amsterdam, closed on February 27, but a dazzling catalog with texts in German and English was published in March by Hirmer Verlag….
Leigh Kamping-Carder tells the story of the Mexican Suitcase, a collection of photographs from the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour that got lost in Mexico for almost 70 years. Ilan Stavans wonders why we can’t escape from Harry Houdini. Shoshana Olidort reviews Avi Steinberg’s “Running the Books: The Adventures…
The German Jewish photographer Gerda Taro (born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart, to a family of Polish Jewish origin) has long been overshadowed by her companion, the legendary photographer Robert Capa. However, that may soon change. Taro (1910- 1937) was the first female war photographer, capturing powerful images of the Spanish Civil War, and was sadly…
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