Lovers in a Dangerous Time

You could make an argument that his death came with a sigh of relief. Robert Capa stepped on land mine in Vietnam in 1954, that  put an end to his corporeal and legal life on this earth. He was a romantic,charismatic, a gentleman and deeply saddened, a sorrow and anguish he carried his whole life like a burden, a yoke around  his neck,a millstone of grief, for the death of his one true love, Gerda Taro. Like Atlas the Titan, destined to support the weight of the heavens, Capa had little respite from the suffering he silently bore and which knew no solace in this world despite countless empty affairs. He displayed a disregard for money and made little effort to attain the fame and fortune he could have achieved.

Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Paris 1936

Capa may be regarded as a pioneer of photo-journalism and in particular covering armed conflict and the people engaged in it. He had a lynx of an eye, an uncanny, otherwordly ability to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. His photos are timeless recollections of the modern world and have artistic value because of their absence of judgement and antagonism.

Gerda Taro was the first female photojounalist to cover the front lines of a war. She refused Capa’s marriage proposal to pursue an ambitious solo career and was killed accidentally by a reversing Republican tank at the Battle of Brunete in 1937. Her work was ardently political and her contracts for Vu Magazine and Ce Soir newspaper were aligned with the Soviet Communist Party. She was martyrized at death and attained the fame her ambitions craved. She learned the art of news photography from Capa and created  her own compelling body of work.

Gerda Taro

Her death and its circumstances read like the skier who pleads with her friends to take one last  descent down a dangerous slope even though the sun was setting. Capa was in Paris at the time preparing for a voyage the two were planning to take to cover the Japanese invasion of China.

” I walked into this empty church/I had no place else to go/When the sweetest voice I ever heard/whispered to my soul/I don’t need to be forgiven for loving you so much/Its written in the scriptures/Its written there in blood/I even heard the angels declare it from above/There ain’t no cure for love/ ( Leonar