Robert Capa - Madrid - 1937

EXTRE M IMPRESSIVE BOOK with photos by Robert Capa (1913-1954), Gerda Taro (1910-1937) and David Robert "Chim" Seymour (1911-1956).

BRILLIANTLY DESIGNED.
PRINTED ON TWO DIFFERENT PAPERS.
WONDERFUL PHOTOMONTAGES BY JOSEP SALA.
SPECTACULAR COVER WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND PHOTOMONTAGE.

With 100 (!) great photographs in black and white and three photo-montages in colour.
Documenting the toll on Spain wielded by Nazi bombing of Madrid.

- Horacio Fernandez, "Photobooks Spain 1905-1977", pages 92-97
- Michel Lefebvre-Peña, "Guerra Grafica. Espagne 1936-1939. Photographes, Artistes et Ecrivains en guerre",
pages 210-211

My business card on the front cover conceals the Nazi symbol, which is prohibited from being displayed in Germany. Every single photo shows the actual condition of the book being offered.

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Robert Capa is one of the most well-known photojournalists of the twentieth century. Born Endre Ernö Friedmann (Budapest, Hungary, October 22, 1913-Thai-Binh, Indochina, May 25, 1954) to a Jewish family of tailors, he studied in Berlin, then fled to Paris in 1933. Quickly gaining an international reputation for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War, he later escaped to New York in 1939. He covered World War II as an Allied photographer, cofounded Magnum Photos in 1947 (with Chim, among others), and made several books based on his photographs of travel in Europe, the USSR, and Israel. He died after stepping on a landmine in 1954.

Gerda Taro was one of the first women to be recognized as a photojournalist, and the first to be killed while reporting on war. Born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart, Germany (August 1, 1910-Brunete, Spain, July 26, 1937) and raised in Leipzig in a middle-class Jewish family, she fled to Paris in 1933. She traveled back and forth from Paris to Spain for the first year of the Spanish Civil War, and while covering the battle of Brunete, she was struck by a tank and died.

Chim, born Dawid Szymin (Warsaw, Poland, November 20, 1911-Suez, Egypt, November 10, 1956), arrived in Paris in 1932 and within two years was a regular contributor to Regards with his photographs of the Popular Front. He covered the entirety of the Spanish Civil War and escaped France in 1939 for New York. He returned to Europe in 1947 and established himself as a foreign correspondent with the byline David Seymour. In 1956 he was killed while covering the Suez Crisis.

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Editions del Comissariat de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 1937.
First and only edition, first printing. 1937.

Paperback (stapled softcover), covers illustrated with photographs and photomontage (as issued). 235 x 300 mm. 96 pages. 100 photographs, 3 hand-colored, double-page photomontages. Various photographers. Photomontage: Josep Sala. Printing: Industries Grafiques Seix, Barcelona i Barral Empresa, Colectivizada, Barcelona. Text in Catalan, Spanish, French and English.

Condition:
Inside clean with no previous owner marks, first pages with heavier trace of use and with some stains, page by page the publication is more and more well-preserved, light trace of use throughout, smaller flaws, but no bigger remarkable flaws or defects (sounds worse than it is, cause most of the pages are really well-preserved); three small tapes at the left edge of first page (to fix the tears that easily occur when opening the book at the level of the staples). Outside covers used and partly stained (like so often), especially in the lower half, always fragile spine with missing parts at the top and in the middle part, teared at the end, but very strong binding, a bit bumped at the end (with little consequence also for the pages, but not dramatically). Overall fairly good condition.

Extrem rare, highly impressive and super sought-after Spanish photo publication - hard to find in any condition.

"In November 1936 the rebel troops reached the gates of Madrid, and the battle to defend the capital began. The long struggle involved the evacuation of civilians and even the legally elected government to Valencia. The Republic was in dire straits, particularly with German and Italian troops supporting Franco (and so putting an end to any semblance of international neutrality. The military operations were accompanied by air raids, for little more reason than to demoralize the besieged. That November the people of Madrid suffered bombardment after bombardment, and the death toll was appalling.
Madrid fought in the trenches but also on the propaganda front in an attempt to obtain help from abroad. In October 1936 the Catalan government had set up the Commissariat of Propaganda to "restore the truth" about the war, embarking on a program of publications aimed at promoting solidarity with the Republic! One of these publications was Madrid, a photobook in which images tell the story.
Madrid is a document about the war on the civilian population, a visual narrative with a beginning and an end, a story in four parts followed by an epilogue. The book opens with a brief foreword in four languages entitled "The Destruction of Madrid" and states that "Fac-tious cruelty delights in the attack of the indefensive civil population" and that German and Italian planes "destroy whole quarters, museums, hospitals, alms-houses, schools." This is followed by a section with images featuring "the truth": the destruction caused by the bomb-ing, including the victims. The second section focuses on the homeless, refugees in particu-lar. The third part covers the evacuation, while the last section is devoted to the reception of the evacuees in Barcelona. This happy ending is nonetheless contradicted by the epilogue, where the story starts again with a return to buildings destroyed by bombs and civilian casualties. The sections of the story are linked by theatrical curtains on three double-page, hand-colored photomontages. No information is given regarding the artists.
Madrid contains no credits whatsoever regarding those responsible for design, text, drawings, photomontage, or photographs. Such information is extremely difficult to track down, as-owing almost certainly to the wholesale destruction of documents in Barcelona in the days prior to the entry of the rebel army-the Commissariat of Propaganda archives no longer exist. Furthermore, the photographs from the fourteen photo albums at the Com-missariat held in the Biblioteca Nacional until 1990 and currently in the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya) - also provide little information on the photographers. Nevertheless, many of the images were published elsewhere with credits or were found in other archives, making possible the identification of a large number of them.
For example, the two cover photographs are images by David Seymour (Chim) that were published on many occasions. Seymour took them in April 1936 (i.e., before the beginning of the Civil War) during a conference near Badajoz on Republican agrarian reforms. The unknown photomontage artist featured people looking expectantly skyward with worried expressions on their faces to create a cover with the power of a poster illustrating the terror of the bombing and the potential casualties. The women and children on the cover symbolize the helplessness of a population exposed to the attacks of fascism, here represented
by a flying torpedo with a swastika printed on it.
The book opens with twenty photographs of buildings in central Madrid that were destroyed by bombs. Most of the pictures are by Luis Lladó, a lecturer and photographer at the School of Architecture in Madrid who was the director of the photographic archive at the Ministries of Propaganda and State during the war and the official photographer of the president of the Republic. The series of images shows gutted houses, flattened workshops, buildings without facades, rubble-filled streets, craters at Metro underground station en-trances, the ruins of a market, the roof of a children's hospital in flames. After these pictures, whose only "casualties" are a traffic light in front of the post office building and a disemboweled horse on a pavement, victims of "the truth" are depicted in official photographs from the mortuary archives. These show twelve dead children with their eyes open and labels with identification numbers. These appalling pictures were subsequently reproduced many times in magazines and posters both in Spain and abroad. At the end of this section, a photomontage of three shots by Robert Capa optimistically highlights the existence of the Republican air defense, although it proved inadequate for turning back the enemy bombers.
The next section is entitled "Under Madrid Soil" and features platforms at underground Metro stations serving as air-raid shelters. The opening montage consists of a drawing of a group of terrified elderly people, women, and children descending steps illuminated by the glow of fires. The drawing is paired with four nighttime photographs taken during the month of November at the Sol and Gran Vía stations. One of these pictures has been attributed to Hans Namuth and Georg Reiner, while the others are definitely by Capa. These three photographers also took the other pictures in this section, some of whose images were reproduced in the international press.
The photomontage at the beginning of the next section, "Desolation and Exodus," consists of three anonymous photographs of the evacuation of the civilian population at the end of November." The next five photographs were taken by Capa in the Vallecas neighborhood.
Dispensing with words, they describe the urgency of evacuation. These are followed by a number of photographs of retreating refugees-mostly children. The last part of this section covers a different situation: those who fled on foot from the front with their belongings, abandoned by the authorities. These tragic pictures, which date from a month before the others, were taken not in Madrid but in the province of Córdoba, and, although not as well known as Capa's falling soldier photograph, they, too, were published in numerous international news media.' That 5 September Capa was not alone. Gerda Taro, Hans Namuth, and Georg Reisner had also taken their cameras to Cerro Muriano (Córdoba).
The fourth section opens with a brighter photomontage featuring a refugee holding a child in her arms and smiling from ear to ear. The photograph was taken by Chim at Barcelona's Montjuic Stadium, the reception center for evacuees! Completing the photomontage is a picture of two soldiers on leave in the company of nannies. They are shown against a panoramic view of Barcelona taken from a high vantage point. A naive picture of the rearguard with no hint of a war that seems almost like something from another world, it is an image that might not even exist... and a sign of the propaganda drive having suddenly become local and perhaps complacent. The next photographs confirm this impression of escape from reality: evacuees are "resting from the long-endured fatigues under Catalonia's sun," "feed themselves at the great refectories of Barcelona", and have "a new school of air and sun to make the evil memories fade away." This time the photographs, which were also printed as serie of postcards, were by Chim and Margaret Michaelis.
As the final text states, this is where Madrid should end, but a question mark hovering over the text (we close the book with a terrible question") rhetorically speculates on the possibility of Barcelona being bombed. A bombing did take place on 13 February 1937, when an Italian warship fired on the city. The new, inevitable presence of "the truth" came as a rude awakening to the local propaganda machine and prompted the addition of four pages with nine pictures of ruins and five of corpses, the only comment being a brief "Barcelona also," which dramatically and definitively brought Madrid back to the beginning-the completion of a sinister full circle."
- Horacio Fernandez -