Exhibit of the week: The Mexican Suitcase: Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives by Capa, Chim, and Taro

International Center of Photography

New York

Through Jan. 9, 2011

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It was long one of the art world’s greatest mysteries, said Emma Allen in Artinfo.com. What happened to famed war photographer Robert Capa’s negatives from the Spanish Civil War? “Known for his gung-ho, first-man-parachuting-onto-the-front-lines approach,” the Hungarian-born Capa captured some of the most urgent battlefield images of all time. When forced to flee France at the onset of World War II, he placed his early negatives in a suitcase and asked a friend to hide them. After that, they disappeared for decades, as “rumors drifted through the art world” of their whereabouts. More than a decade ago, they finally turned up in Mexico City, among the belongings of a former Mexican ambassador to Vichy France. “Stored in three cardboard boxes—not in a suitcase, it turns out”—were some 4,500 images of war-torn Spain.

The “first big surprise” of this recovered treasure was “how much of the film was not Capa’s,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. The International Center of Photography’s current exhibition reveals that close to two-thirds of the images had been made by two of Capa’s colleagues—David Seymour, a Polish-born photographer who went by the name Chim, and Gerda Taro, a German who was both Capa’s lover and the first female photojournalist to cover a war from the front lines. The presence of their work in the show is no distraction: It deepens our sense of a conflict that turned out to be a dress rehearsal for World War II. Seymour’s images are gentler than Capa’s. Whether his pictures show us “anxious children” or soldiers on the front lines, they “feel somber and restrained, never sensational.” Taro, meanwhile, “comes across as a bold presence here” in her “brutally unblinking views” of a city morgue after an air raid. Her images of the Battle of Brunete seem even more eerie considering that she was killed there when struck by a tank.

Unfortunately, the ICP doesn’t do the trio’s work justice, said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. Few of the photos are displayed at a suitable size; instead, the curators printed selected rolls of film as contact sheets, neither enlarging the images nor editing out the chaff. That choice helps us understand the photographers’ methods, but means the pictures are “nearly too small to examine with the naked eye.” More troubling, the show never quite confronts the fact that Capa and Co. were less journalists than “risk-taking publicists” for the anti-fascist cause. That these photographs are propaganda—some of the best and most noble ever made—doesn’t take anything away from the bravery or brilliance of Capa, Chim, and Taro. But a failure to squarely confront this complexity makes this show “simultaneously tantalizing and frustrating.”