Workers of the image: memory(ies) of Gerda Taro

Abstract

Among the famous names of international photojournalism who converged in Spain during the Civil War, Gerda Taro’s was only recently rediscovered after many decades of oblivion. A fundamental piece of the cooperative action which aimed to the elaboration of an iconography of the Spanish Republic and of the fight undertaken both by the trade unions and, more generally, by the Spanish people menaced by fascism, Taro’s work is a still partially unknown page of the media-related, ideological and political effort towards the constitution of an internationalist movement which was to oppose compactly the raise of nationalist totalitarianism in Europe. Through an analysis of the auto-narration sketched by Taro herself, as well as of the mitification of her death iconized by the French Communist Party and some more recent fictional works where she appears as a literary character, the main aim of this article is to reconstruct the different stages in the construction and transmission of Taro’s collective memory. The ultimate objective is to evaluate where a proper recognition for her antifascist effort has reached the contemporaneity.