Funny thing happened today over on Instagram. Magnum, the photo cooperative, published an interesting photo of Gerda Taro with a short text. She was a photo journalist in the period just before the 2nd world war with a tragically short career – she was killed at the age of 26 in 1937. I had heard about her while reading up on Robert Capa some years ago.
It was a pleasure to see that today, International Womens rights Day, that Gerda Taro was being spoken about, however I felt Magnums text was incomplete, not having mentionned Robert Capa – the two had been lovers, and even shared the same ‘nom du plume’ to publish their, collective, images. In fact it turns out that a substantial amount of the work published by « Robert Capa » was by Gerda.
Visibly this was NOT to the taste of everyone – namely a certain Chris Helgren who, on one of the few bits of his web site that actually works, says he is a photographer working for REUTERS. He criticised me for mentioning Capas name saying « …because nothing says Women’s Day better than a reference to a man. »
You got it wrong mate – I think it’s great that someone has finally dug up Gerda Taro’s name for all to see and appreciate her work – I simply mentionned Capa’s name to give context and not in anyway to denegrate the importance of her or the article.
But of course this person says he works for REUTERS, so he must be right.
Whatever…