Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa by Jane Rogoyska – review

With two films about Taro and Capa in the offing, this biography and critical reappraisal is both timely and well researched

Sean O'Hagan

A bigger adventure … Gerda Taro and Robert Capa in 1936. Their creative and romantic relationship was integral to his development as a photojournalist. Photograph: Fred Stein Archive/Getty Images

Gerda Taro was the first female photojournalist to die in battle. On 25 July 1937, she was shooting on the front line of the Spanish civil war alongside her then partner, fellow photographer Ted Allan. As loyalist planes strafed retreating republican troops, the couple hitched a ride on the running board of a car, which was then rammed by an out-of-control republican tank. Taro was thrown on to the ground. She died of her injuries in a field hospital a few hours later, aged 26.

1. Gerda Taro
2. by Jane Rogoyska
3. 

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In death, Taro became a legend and a leftwing heroine. Her funeral in Paris, orchestrated by the French Communist party as a large-scale gesture of solidarity with the Spanish people, was attended by more than 10,000 people. Among the mourners was an inconsolable Robert Capa, the greatest war photographer of the time, and Taro's former lover and soulmate. While Capa's place in the canon of 20th-century photography was assured even before his death in action in Indochina in 1954, aged 40, it would take 70 years for Taro to emerge from his shadow and be recognised in her own right role as a pioneering photojournalist.

As its title suggests, Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa is a deftly illustrated mix of biography and critical reappraisal. It follows on from two other recent studies: Gerda Taro by Irme Schaber (Steidl), published in 2007, and Out of the Shadows: A Life of Gerda Taro by François Maspero (Souvenir Press), from 2008. What sets this biography apart is the way in which it unpicks Taro and Capa's creative and romantic relationship, showing, in the process, how integral she was to his development.

They met in Paris in 1934, when he was plain André Friedmann, an exile who had been forced to flee Hungary because of his anti-fascist activism, and she was Gerta Pohorylle, a leftwing Jewish emigre who had escaped Nazi Germany. Both were radicals and free spirits and together they invented Robert Capa, a fictitious photographer with a big reputation and fees to match. The ruse worked and soon Capa was wearing expensive suits and Taro was not just running his agency but learning from him how to take great photographs. It was the beginning of a bigger adventure that would take them to Spain in 1936 to cover resistance to General Franco's fascist rebellion, a decision based on political conviction as much as photographic ambition.

The rest is history, albeit of an extraordinarily tangled kind. It was not until the discovery of the "Mexican suitcase" in 2007, containing thousands of negatives by Capa and Taro, that it became clear that hundreds of images that had been attributed to him had actually been taken by her. The reappraisal continues apace with this book.

With two films about Capa and Taro's relationship in the offing, it may be an opportune time to acquaint oneself with this well-researched, and meticulously recreated, story of their overlapping lives before the myth takes over.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/02/gerda-taro-inventing-robert-capa-review