Gerda Taro

Gerda Taro (real name Gerta Pohorylle; 1 August 1910, Stuttgart, Germany - 26 July 1937, near Brunete, Spain) was born into a Polish-Jewish family that migrated from Galicia to Germany. She became a war photographer, and the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa. Taro is regarded as the first female photojournalist to cover the front lines of a war and to die while doing so.

Gerta Pohorylle was born in 1910, in Stuttgart, into a middle-class Jewish Galician family. Pohorylle attended a Swiss boarding school.

In 1929, the family moved to Leipzig, just prior to the beginning of Nazi Germany. Taro opposed the Nazi Party, joining leftist groups. In 1933, she was arrested and detained for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. Eventually, the entire Pohorylle household was forced to leave Nazi Germany toward different destinations. Taro would not see her family again.

Escaping the anti-Semitism of Hitler's Germany, Pohorylle moved to Paris in 1934. In 1935, she met the photojournalist Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, becoming his personal assistant and learning photography. They fell in love. Pohorylle began to work for Alliance Photo as a picture editor.

In 1936, Pohorylle received her first photojournalist credential. Then, she and Friedmann devised a plan. Both took news photographs, but these were sold as the work of the non-existent American photographer Robert Capa, which was a convenient name overcoming the increasing political intolerance prevailing in Europe and belonging in the lucrative American market. Capa was derived from Friedmann's Budapest street nickname "Cápa" which means "Shark" in Hungarian. The secret did not last long, but Friedman kept the more commercial name "Capa" for his own name, while Pohorylle adopted the professional name of "Gerda Taro" after the Japanese artist Tarō Okamoto and Swedish actress Greta Garbo. The two worked together to cover the events surrounding the coming to power of the Popular Front in 1930s France.

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