Paris in the summer of 1937. A giant funeral procession

wends its way from the city center eastward

toward the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, accompanied

by the sounds of Chopin's funeral

march. The photojournalist Gerda Taro had been

killed in the Spanish Civil War a few days earlier.

Thousands come to pay their last respects to the

émigrée from Hitler's Germany. The poet Louis

Aragon speaks at the graveside, young girls hold

up a large portrait of the deceased. Why did the

French Communist Party honor a foreigner - one

who was not even a member of the Party - with

a 'firstclass' burial?

Ernest Hemingway is said to have found Gerda

Taro while searching for 'better Germans',

the term he used to describe Germans fighting

on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Taro is today considered one of the path-breaking

pioneers of photography. She captured some

of the most dramatic and widely published images

of the Spanish Civil War and was the first

female photographer to shoot images in the

midst of battle. Her willingness to work close to

the fighting set new standards for war photography

and ultimately cost her her life. Taro stands

alongside early twentieth century war photographers

like Robert Capa and David 'Chim' Seymour.

Her death, the first fatality during war coverage,

garnered worldwide attention. She had

broken new ground, as a woman and as a photographer.

Despite this, Gerda Taro has largely fallen into

oblivion, especially in comparison to her colleague

and partner Robert Capa. Whether gender

and religion played a role in this would require

a separate investigation. In any case, in her

study of women resisting fascism, Ingrid Strobl

reaches the conclusion that a combination such

as womanCommunistJew represented a threefold

stigma, and would almost guarantee Taro's

exclusion from official history, both in the East

and the West.

It has been almost twenty years since the first

biography of Gerda Taro, written by Irme Schaber,

led to Taro's rediscovery as a photographer.

Since that time, the discovery of the 'Mexican

Suitcase', containing more than 800 of her photos,

has made new research on Taro possible.

In this new, fully revised biography, Irme Schaber

presents groundbreaking insights regarding

cameras, copyrights and the circumstances surrounding

Taro's death.