The Mexican Suitcase and a puzzle resolved

"The Mexican Suitcase" is the title of an exhibition of rediscovered Spanish Civil War negatives by Robert Capa, David Seymour (Chim) and Gerda Taro. It is being shown until 9th January at the International Center of Photography in New York and I was fortunate enough to visit it in December. The title of the exhibition refers to the recent (2007) discovery in Mexico of three small cardboard boxes of negatives which had disappeared out of Capa's Paris studio at the beginning of WW2 and presumed lost, although there were always rumours of their survival.


Many of the images of the above three photographers are very recognisable as they appeared in foreign news magazines during the Spanish Civil War and were reproduced subsequently for other publications. To provide context with these images, the exhibition displayed copies of the original magazines.


The negatives provide an amazing record of the years of the Spanish Civil War, both of the fighting and of the affects on the ordinary people of Spain as they struggled with their everyday lives. The most fascinating aspect of the find has been the possibility of adding context to the published photographs by being able to trace, through the strips of negatives, what happened before and after the published image. It was also apparent how many images were taken to produce those iconic photographs.

I wrote in February last year about what I called the David Seymour 'puzzle' relating to his famous photograph titled 'A Public Meeting in Estremadura, just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Spain. 1936' but sometimes, confusingly, called 'Air Raid Over Barcelona,1938' (see the standard text 'Photography. A Concise History.' by Ian Jeffrey page 189). The original negative was on one of the strips discovered in Mexico and clearly demonstrates that it had nothing to do with an air raid, or Barcelona.

An explanation for the mistaken identity was suggested by the exhibition curator as follows. The photograph was first published on May 14th 1936 in 'Regards', the magazine of the French Communist Party and reproduced in the magazine 'Madrid' in 1937 with a montage of airplanes flying over the woman, so was mis-captioned as being during an air raid. The negative being lost, later reproductions were made from copy prints which not only cropped the original composition but darkened the tones, reinforcing the erroneous identification. This seems quite convincing to me as the image shown in books like 'Photography. A Concise History' (referred to above) is much more tightly cropped than the original negative which shows a large crowd of peasants in a village square rather than several anxious-looking faces.

All in all, this was an excellent exhibition, both from a photographic and historical perspective and I hope that it comes to the UK sometime soon. I wanted to buy the exhibition catalogue but was somewhat dismayed by the US $98 price tag. Still, I have a few postcards to remind me!