Tag Archives: Google

Gerda Taro

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Pioneering female war photographer

Today marks the 108th birthday of Gerda Taro, widely considered to be the first female photojournalist to cover war… she was also the first to die doing so.  Google celebrated the day with the following Doodle:

Gerda Taro

Toro’s was born Gerda Pohorylle, in 1910, Stuttgart.  As a Jew, the rise of the Nazi Party forced her out of Germany in 1934, separated from her family who she never saw again.  Gerta moved to Paris where she began her career as a photojournalist, alongside André Friedmann, a man who she met in the French capital in 1935.

Taro and CapaFred Stein Archive/Getty Images (1936) Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, Paris.

Pohorylle and Friedmann began to publish works under the fictional American pseudonym of Robert Capa, a name he would take on as his own, whilst Gerta changed hers to Gerda Taro in homage to Japanese artist Taro Okamoto and Greta Garbo.  The pair began their work in war photography in 1936 when they travelled to Barcelona to cover the Spanish Civil War, both producing photographs under the name Robert Capa.  She not only photographed the violence of the time, but passionately campaigned against fascism that was rife across Europe.

Republican MilitiawomenGerda Taro/The International Center of Photography (1936) Republican militiawoman training on the beach, outside Barcelona

Taro was covering the Battle of Brunete, near Madrid, in 1937 when tragedy struck and a car she was travelling in was hit by a tank. She died the next day due to her wounds at the age of just 26.  This left Capa heart-broken and he never went on to marry.  While photographing French manoeuvres in the Red River delta, Capa stepped on an anti-personnel mine and was killed on May 25 1954.

Taro and Capa both died while in the midst of the action, camera in hand,  committed to their cause and to their trade.

Taro initially worked with a medium format 6 x 6 cm Old Standard Rolleiflex TLR camera with a non coated Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 75mm f/3.5 lens.  In the final five months of her life (possibly influenced by Capa´s chromed Leica III (Model F) and Summar 5 cm f/2 lens), Taro worked with a black lacquer Leica II (Model D) with Nickel Elmar 50mm f/3.5 lens.  Further details HERE.

Leica Model II

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

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Russian chemist and photographer

Today marks the 155th birthday of the Russian chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.  An event immortalised in today’s Google Doodle animation.

sergey-prokudin-gorskys-155th-birthday

Between 1909 and 1915 Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky traveled through Russia in a railroad car specially equipped with a mobile darkroom to document Russian life using a technique he called ”optical colour projection.”

Born in Murom, Vladimir Province, Russia, on this day in 1863, Prokudin-Gorsky was a chemist who became interested in photography.  He travelled to Germany to study with Adolf Miethe, a pioneer of the colour separation method, and soon developed his own formulation for photographic emulsion so he could create life-like photos in natural colours.  His portrait of the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy was widely reproduced, bringing Prokudin-Gorsky a measure of fame.  As a result, Tsar Nicholas II agreed to sponsor his ambitious project.

Prokudin-Gorsky’s images of people, landscapes, architecture, historic sites, industry, and agriculture were created by exposing three glass plates through three different colour filters – green, red and blue – and then combining them to create a composite colour image.  He captured thousands of images that offer a rare glimpse of Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution and First World War.

Prokudin-Gorsky planned to use the resulting photos to educate Russian school children about their vast country.  Today, his body of work is preserved on thousands of glass plates, which are prized by historians and scholars.

Gorskii._Austrian_prisoners_of_war_in_Olonets_province (low res)

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1915) Austro-Hungarian POW, Russia

While Prokudin-Gorsky’s work shows only a tenuous link to my research, it does provide a glimpse of early multiple exposure bracketing at a time when capturing a single image was demanding enough.  To have to produce three glass plates for each photograph while ensuring that every aspect of the scene remains constant must have been incredibly demanding, to say nothing of the extraordinary physical size of the growing portfolio.