LONDON.- Gerda Taro (1910 -1937) is a pioneering photojournalist who spent her brief but dramatic career photographing on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. The first woman to photograph in the heat of battle and the first known to die in action, her images are a striking yet little-known record of an important moment in the history of war photography. Taro’s personal narrative and her documentation of female militia members, also illustrate the changing possibilities for women in Europe in the 1930s.

This is the first major exhibition of Gerda Taro’s work in the UK, comprising over 80 photographs and examples of the many European and American magazines and books that reproduced Taro’s dynamic and impassioned war coverage. The exhibition highlights her interest in New Vision photography, playing with unexpected vantage points and printing techniques to create a fresh way of capturing the visible world.

Taro was born Gerta Pohorylle, the daughter of a liberal Polish Jewish family living in Germany. Arrested in 1933 for participating in an anti-Nazi protest, she fled for Paris where she met Hungarian photographer André Friedmann. A romance developed between Gerta and André, and Gerta increasingly managed the business side of André’s work, while beginning to experiment with taking her own photographs. Frustrated with their lack of success in selling André’s stories, the pair constructed a fictional American photographer named Robert Capa, under whose singular identity their work might fare better than as that of the many Eastern European Jewish émigrés in Paris. In turn, Gerta, changed her name to Gerda Taro. Both names had Hollywood resonances; Robert Capa echoing American filmmaker Frank Capra, and Gerda Taro recalling Greta Garbo.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out on July 17, 1936, Taro and Capa arranged immediately to go to Barcelona, eager to photograph active combat, and to participate in a leftist cause for which they were deeply sympathetic. Photographing side-by-side and often recording the same scenes, they published their pictures in leading European picture magazines, such as Vu in France or the Züricher Illustrierte in Switzerland. After returning to Paris for the autumn and early winter, they made a second trip to Spain in February 1937. Photographs from this latter trip are difficult to differentiate, since the pair had begun to publish their photographs ‘Capa & Taro.’ It appears that their romance had cooled by this point, and Capa returned to Paris at the end of the month, while Taro stayed on in Spain alone. Continuing to photograph the conflict, she began to distinguish herself with an increasingly successful independent career in the French leftist press, and took some of her most arresting photographs at this time; in a hospital and morgue following the bombing of Valencia and reporting from the battle for the city of Brunete.

Her front line photographs of this battle in July 1937 were the breakthrough in her career. However, on 25 July, as the Loyalist position in Brunete faltered, Taro found herself in the midst of a hasty retreat. She jumped on the running-board of a car transporting casualties. A tank sideswiped the car, knocking Taro to the ground. She died the next day. Her body was returned to Paris, where Taro was proclaimed an anti-facist martyr. Her funeral, attended by tens of thousands, was held in the French capital on what would have her 27th birthday.

This exhibition highlights Taro’s continuing legacy in the history of photography. In the decades following World War I, photographers grappled with ways to express social and political conditions in a world that appeared increasingly capable of atrocities. Taro expanded the expressive power of the image, and helped define photography as the primary vehicle of modern consciousness. Capturing the heat of battle in the midst of action, and braving conditions of war to depict civilian suffering, Taro has left an indelible impression on the history of war photography.

Gerdo Taro is one of three interrelated exhibitions on the subject of war and photography. Seven years after the West’s ‘War on Terror’ began in Afghanistan, Barbican Art Gallery reflects on conflict and its representation, with exhibitions of Taro, photojournalist Robert Capa, This Is War! Robert Capa at Work and On the Subject of War which presents four contemporary artistic responses to current events in Iraq and Afghanistan by Paul Chan, Omer Fast, Geert van Kesteren and An-My Lê.