Main content

Searching For Gerda Taro

Searching For Gerda Taro

If you are not affiliated with a college or university, and are interested in watching this film, please register as an individual and login to rent this film. Already registered? Login to rent this film. This film is also available on our home streaming platform, OVID.tv.

The woman in the black-and-white photo is bent in a lunge, one knee on the ground. She wears shoes with heels and leans forward, a hand on her back for support, looking intensely past the barrel of the revolver in her hand.

This is one of hundreds of iconic images shot by photographer Gerda Taro during the Spanish Civil War. A war she would cover for only a year before she herself would die — the first female war photographer to be killed on assignment.

SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO celebrates the life and work of Taro — a charismatic Jewish refugee from Germany, an anti-fascist, and a trailblazing photographer whose work would be forgotten for decades.

In 1935, Taro (then going by her birth name, Gerta Pohorylle), met Endre Friedmann, a Jewish photographer from Hungary trying to make a name for himself in Paris. They fell in love and moved in together. The next year, they changed their names to Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. Capa taught Taro photography. Taro in turn helped sell his photos and build his reputation. Together, they went to Spain to report on the civil war from the front lines. She captured the heroism of Republican fighters and documented the world’s first deaths of civilians from aerial bombardment.

SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO shares dozens of stunning archival images by and of Taro. We come to understand her life and work through conversations with curators, authors, and descendants of those who knew her. For decades, her legacy was wrapped up with Capa’s, many of her photos seemingly lost. But with the discovery of thousands of her negatives in the mid-1990s, Taro can finally enjoy the credit she deserves as a brilliant photographer in her own right.

Related Films

The Spectre of Hope

Critic and writer John Berger and photographer Sebastião Salgado.…

Remembrance of Things to Come

Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, Chris Marker romps…

Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own

An artistic biography of one of the few women in the world working in…