Gerta Pohorylle (1910–1937)

Gerta Pohorylle was born in Stuttgart, Germany to a Hungarian-Polish Jewish family. She was educated in Leipzig and at a Swiss boarding school. With the increase in Nazi persecution of Jews, she became an anti-Nazi activist and was arrested when that regime rose to power in Germany in 1933. After her release, her family left Germany and she fled to Paris. There she worked as a photo editor and fell in love with André Freidmann, a Hungarian-born Jewish émigré. The pair assumed the pseudonyms Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. As photojournalist colleagues, they worked to document the Popular Front movement in France. In 1936, they went to Spain to cover the Civil War there. Together they changed the nature of war photography, reinventing the form in the dynamic way we know it today. All their images of the war were published under Capa's name. Gerda Taro left Capa and was producing work under her own name when she was killed at age 26 while covering the Battle of Brunete in July 1937. She became an inspiration to many female war correspondents who followed her. A forgotten cache of thousands of negatives belonging to Taro and Capa was discovered a few years ago (see the 2011 documentary film The Mexican Suitcase). Many photographs formerly attributed to Capa have now been identified as Gerda Taro's. The monument on her grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris was created by Alberto Giacometti.