The Touch of the Image: Affect and Materiality in Photojournalism of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ways in which humanitarian photographs of the Spanish Civil War by a range of international and Spanish photographers, male and female, touch spectators (emotionally and materially) in order to secure their support for the Republican cause. The distribution networks for these photographs are explained, together with the recycling of images, sometimes out of context. The visual analysis is informed by recourse to affect theory, with particular emphasis on the role of materiality in producing an impact on the spectator.

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others starts by citing Virginia Woolf’s observations—in her 1938 reflection on war, Three Guineas—on the photographs of air raid damage and victims, including dead children, that she was receiving twice a week from the Spanish Republican government during the winter of 1936–1937 (Sontag 2003, 3-7). It was at this time, starting in late October 1936, three months into the Spanish Civil War, that Madrid came under intense aerial bombardment from the General Franco’s Nationalist rebels, supported by Hitler and Mussolini. This chapter will consider humanitarian photographs of the Spanish Civil War by Spanish and foreign photojournalists, three female (Gerda Taro, Kati Horna, and Ione Robinson) and three male (Robert Capa, ‘Chim’, and Agustí Centellles). I limit discussion to photographs circulated in support of the Republic, which organised sophisticated networks for the dissemination of images, whether via international press and aid agencies, or via its own propaganda departments. I will question what counts as a humanitarian image, as well as engage with the fraught debate on whether empathy is an adequate response to photographs of suffering. I will take literally the notion that humanitarian images ‘touch’ us by exploring their material impact on the viewer in the light of theoretical writing on affect, which over the past two decades has emerged as part of a broader interest in the history of emotions.

I use the term ‘affect’ in the sense it has acquired in contemporary affect theory, which draws on pre-modern understandings of feeling, prior to the emergence of the term ‘emotion’ in the Romantic period. The new term ‘emotion’, closely linked to the emergence of the liberal concept of the autonomous individual, signified a new understanding of feeling as the core of an authentic inner self. This differed radically from the pre-modern notions of ‘passion’ and ‘affect’ which were seen as entering the self from the outside. ‘Passions’ were ‘accidents of the soul’, suffered by the individual in the form of possession by outside forces. ‘Affect’ was famously defined by the seventeenth-century Sephardic Jewish philosopher in Amsterdam, Spinoza, as a two-way bodily process: the capacity to affect and be affected. Contemporary affect theorists have drawn on Spinoza’s discussion of affect to undo the modern self-centred concept of emotion and to elaborate an understanding of feeling that is based on relationship—with others and with the material world.¹ Emotion, too, has been rethought, notably by Sara Ahmed (2004), as being the result of an encounter with the world rather than a property of the self. What distinguishes affect from emotion is that the former involves an intense bodily reaction to a material stimulus. This chapter will be particularly interested in the material component of the response to humanitarian photographs; that is, on the relationship between the materiality of what is depicted and the bodily impact on the viewer.

Analog photography, of course, gives us the literal imprint of material reality on the negative. It was this that allowed Roland Barthes—in his classic discussion of photography, Camera lucida—to theorise his concept of the ‘punctum’ as a detail in a photograph that ‘wounds’ or ‘pierces’ us in an intensely physical manner (1984, 26-27). Affect theory was also anticipated by the theorisation of hapticity—that is, tactile visuality—in cinema studies. The concept was developed—by Steven Shaviro (1993), Laura Marks (2000, 2002), and Vivian Sobchack (2004)—as a reaction against the psychoanalytically driven ‘gaze theory’ that dominated cinema studies since it was first propounded by Laura Mulvey in the mid-1970s (Mulvey 1989). According to gaze theory, the gaze (that of the camera, which is also that of the spectator) is a form of mastery (constructing a male subject position) that reifies its object (frequently female or, if not, feminised). The proponents of hapticity, by contrast, insist on the vulnerability of the spectator, who is affected in a very bodily way by the image on screen. As Marks puts it, the haptic means ‘Touching, not mastery’—vision not as cognition (the basis of Enlightenment empiricism) but as contact (2002, xii, xiii). It is the involvement of senses other than vision in our relationship with the world—and with images—that makes that relationship one of contact. The theorisation of hapticity rethinks vision as ‘embodied and material’ (Marks 2002, xiii). The key feature of the haptic image is not clarity (enabling us to identify what is depicted) but texture (the material ‘feel’ of the real) (Marks 2002, 8). As Marks insists, the embodied response generated by the haptic image involves an ‘ethics of shared embodiment’ (2002, 8), a response not of detached observation but of corporeal engagement. Sobchack notes that to be concerned with the ways in which images ‘touch us’ is to have a ‘materialist … understanding of aesthetics and ethics’ (2004, 3; emphasis in original). Like Marks, she sees this as an ethics since ‘response’ means ‘responsibility’ (2004, 3).

What, then, is a humanitarian image? At the very least, it is an image that elicits a sense of responsibility in us. And it does so by touching us. Fehrenbach and Rodogno note that humanitarianism could not have emerged without the parallel development, in the mid-nineteenth century, of photographic technologies (2015, 3). Standard definitions of humanitarian aid—for example, those of the United Nations and International Red Cross—define it as politically neutral and impartial action to alleviate suffering in situations of man-made or natural disaster.² But in practice much humanitarian action has been in support of a particular cause; Michael Barnett, in his history of humanitarianism, points out that neutrality and impartiality ‘were not part of humanitarianism’s original DNA’ until the 1960s (2011, 5). Sontag notes that the photographs Virginia Woolf received from the Spanish Republican Government were not calls to end the war, as the pacifist Woolf seems to have supposed, but appeals to their recipients in the Western democracies to lobby their governments to abandon their appeasement of fascism by supplying arms to the Republic (2003, 8-9). In practice, the Western democracies’ Non-Intervention Pact meant that donations to the Republic from those countries could only be for strictly humanitarian ends: ambulances and medical aid for the wounded in battle or the victims of Nationalist air raids; or money to support refugee centres, especially those for children. Such donations were explicitly partisan. When the same images were disseminated in Spain within the Republican zone, they were overt calls to take up arms in the Republic’s defence. I will take ‘humanitarian images’ to mean both those aimed at relieving suffering and those designed to boost the Republican war effort, since defence of the Republic was seen as a war to protect human rights by defeating fascism.

The response of viewers to humanitarian images is, of course, historically situated, depending on their prior experience of seeing images of suffering and displacement. In the case of overseas viewers at the time of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the closest comparator—for those old enough to remember them—is the images that appeared in the Western press of soldiers killed or wounded in the carnage of World War I. But the images of the Spanish Civil War that circulated widely overseas were different, for this was the first war that saw the systematic bombing of civilian targets, producing a massive exodus of refugees. A curious feature of the coverage by photojournalists of military combat in the Spanish Civil War is the lack of emphasis on the wounded, for the function of such coverage was not to raise aid but to chart the progress of the war—for this reason, I do not include battle photographs in this discussion of humanitarian images.³ The dead or wounded bodies that appear in photographs of the Spanish Civil War are those of civilians. This novelty increased their shock value for viewers accustomed to think of war as something that took place on the battlefield. War was now seen as something that could affect everyone; captions to photographs circulated overseas frequently stressed that, if fascism was not stopped in Spain, ‘it will be your turn next’.

The blurring of the line between the two goals of relieving suffering and supporting the Republican war effort is illustrated by the multiple uses made of a set of photographs taken in a Madrid morgue on 30 October 1936, of children killed in Nationalist air raids that day. These photographs, which were certainly among those received by Virginia Woolf, deployed precisely such captions. The head of the Catalan Propaganda Commissariat, Jaume Miravitlles, described in a February 1937 interview how he set in motion a massive propaganda operation to print 10,000 sets of these photos, taken by one of his staff photographers, within forty-eight hours and to mail them all over the world, including to Hitler (Solé i Sabaté and Villaroya 2005, 130). The result was worldwide press coverage. The same photos were further circulated by international relief organisations, for example, the pamphlet The Crimes of Francisco Franco issued by the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy (Faber 2018, 48). Posters in English and French featuring a particularly photogenic dead child were mailed overseas; the caption on the English version read ‘If you tolerate this, your children will be next’ (Stradling 2008, 13, 141). The message that fascism must be defeated in Spain to prevent a future international conflagration is a clear appeal to lobby against the Non-Intervention Pact. The image of the same dead child was also printed on a Catalan postage stamp with the slogan ‘Ajut a l’Espanya anti-feixista’ (Aid anti-fascist Spain), a simple way of disseminating the message abroad (Lefebvre-Peña 2013, 155-157). A photo feature depicting several of the 30th October child victims appeared in the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, likely to have boosted the Communist Party’s recruitment for the International Brigades, then at its height (Holmes 2018, 70-71). All this overseas propaganda served both to lobby for Western military support and to raise funds for air raid victims. The caption to a similar photo feature printed on a poster for display in the Republican zone in Spain had the explicit aim of boosting recruitment to the Republican army: ‘¡Asesinos! ¿Quién al ver esto no empuña un fusil para aplastar el fascismo destructor?’ [Murderers! Who, seeing this, wouldn’t take up arms to quash fascist destruction?] (Stradling 2008, 238).

The dissemination of this set of photos of child air raid victims gives some idea of the importance attached by the Republic to influencing overseas opinion. A photograph only becomes a humanitarian photograph if it circulates, of course. The principal Republican agencies responsible for circulating humanitarian photographs were:

• 1. the central Republican Government’s Ministry of Propaganda (from May 1937, the Propaganda Subsecretariat of the Ministry of State), with a delegation in Paris;

• 2. the Propaganda Delegation of the Madrid Defence Junta;

• 3. the Catalan Propaganda Commissariat (the most effective), with over 300 employees and delegations in Paris, London, Brussels, Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen; and

• 4. the Foreign Propaganda Office of the anarchist trade union CNT (National Workers Confederation).

In addition, international illustrated magazines—the 1930s was the great age of the illustrated magazine—hired foreign photojournalists like the Hungarian Robert Capa, the German Gerda Taro, or the Polish Chim to undertake assignments, or bought photographs taken by them as freelancers. Capa, Taro, and Chim sold their photos to around fifty international newspapers and magazines, chiefly in France, Britain, and the United States but also in the Soviet Union, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and Japan, ranging in political affiliation from Communist to Catholic; they also sold their photos to Spanish Republican propaganda agencies (Faber 2018, 16, 36).⁴ The Catalan photojournalist Agustí Centelles, employed by the Catalan Propaganda Commissariat, additionally sold his pictures to the top French, British, and American illustrated magazines, as well as the Barcelona press (Centelles 2011, 107-163).⁵ The Hungarian anarchist Kati Horna was employed by the CNT’s Foreign Propaganda Office and her photos appeared in the anarchist magazines Mujeres Libres, Libre Studio, Tierra y Libertad, Tiempos Nuevos, and Umbral, of which she was graphic editor (Horna 1992, 9-10, 16-17).⁶

A key player in the dissemination in continental Europe of images of Republican civilian suffering was the Paris-based German exile and anti-fascist media entrepreneur Willi Münzenberg, who was quick to realise their political potential. Münzenberg, associated with the Comintern till 1937, created numerous pro-Republican aid committees as well as helping to set up the Agence Espagne in early 1937 to coordinate Republican propaganda in Europe (Gruber 1965; Cuevas-Wolf 2008). By contrast, Rose Holmes has shown how British press and aid agencies preferred to publish heart-warming pictures of Republican childcare facilities rather than images of atrocities; The Daily Worker’s display of child corpses was untypical (Holmes 2018, 70, 75-76, 82). Indeed, many of the photographs that were circulated both in Spain and overseas do not depict suffering and destruction but elicit support for the Republic by giving a positive image of life in the Republican zone. This is true of photos by Spanish and foreign photojournalists—even those celebrated as war photographers like Capa, Taro, and Chim. I include these positive images in the category of humanitarian photographs since they shared with images of suffering the dual aim of raising donations and campaigning against the Non-Intervention Pact.

The partisanship of humanitarian images is supported by Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the ‘civil contract of photography’—a contract that she regards as inherent in all photographs of political violence (2008; 2012). In proposing such a contract, she argues for a view of photography as not limited to the photograph as artefact, nor to the photographer as individual creator, but as a practice constituted by the confluence of the various persons involved in what she calls the ‘event of photography’: that is, all those involved in what was going on when the photograph was taken and in how the photograph circulates and is viewed subsequently. The spectator, she argues, is bound by an ethical duty to reconstruct what has remained off-frame: that is, the power relations that shaped the scene and leave their trace on the image even though they are not present in it.

Azoulay’s insistence on the importance of reconstructing the off-frame can be related to Georges Didi-Huberman’s theorisation, in Images in Spite of All (2008), of the role of the imagination on the part of the viewer. Rejecting the idea that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, Didi-Huberman argues for the imagination as a form of montage by which spectators establish associations between the image under view and other images familiar to them, in order to interpret an image of an event that lies outside their experience (2008, 120-150). This imaginative montage is what makes the image ‘readable’. While photographs of the Spanish Civil War are not comparable to those of the Holocaust, the novelty of their depiction of civilian casualties would have required a similar exercise of the imagination in the overseas viewers at whom they were chiefly aimed; we can only hypothesise as to the associations they would have made, which will have been different from those we make today in our world saturated with global images of civilian suffering. As Didi-Huberman puts it, in agreement with Azoulay, ‘the image is not all’ (2008, 124); indeed, the very impulse to create an image is, he suggests, an impulse ‘to show what we cannot see’ (2008, 133). Thus, photographs can depict feelings, despite the fact that feelings are invisible. This is a crucial perception for an understanding of humanitarian images, which depict emotional scenarios in which the emotions may or may not express themselves in the facial gestures and body language of the persons depicted. Thus, Didi-Huberman insists, ‘images show in spite of all what cannot be seen’ (2008, 133). It is this imaginative montage that produces emotional intensity in the spectator—what he calls a ‘visual form of haunting’ (2008, 138); that is, being affected by something that is not ‘in’ the image but is evoked by it.

Didi-Huberman stresses that this act of imagination in the face of an image of suffering should not be confused with empathetic claims to share that suffering (2008, 159). Azoulay similarly develops her notion of the civil contract, which obliges us ethically to reconstruct the off-frame, in order to argue against compassion as the appropriate response to photographs of suffering, since compassion reduces the persons photographed to ‘objects’ of pity (2008, 17). Hence, her rejection of Sontag’s expression ‘regarding the pain of others’ (2012, 227). Sontag uses the term ‘others’ to remind us that any claim that we, as viewers, ‘feel with’ the victims depicted in atrocity photographs is hypocritical, for we do not and cannot occupy their position (2003, 102, 125-126). Azoulay rejects Sontag’s ‘othering’, insisting that photographic subjects, no matter how terrible their plight and regardless of whether they look directly at the camera or even know that they are being photographed, have agency in that they make demands on us to recognise that their situation is intolerable. The spectator’s gaze is a civil gaze in that it involves constructing a shared space of personhood. To quote Azoulay: ‘the photographic image is unlike any other image—it is the product of being together through photography’ (2008, 166). The ‘civil contract of photography’, which requires us to reconstruct what is off-frame, does not allow us to claim that we feel the pain of the persons depicted, but it helps us to understand what has produced it. Didi-Huberman’s conclusion is similar: ‘the imagination [is] animated precisely by … our difficulty in understanding that which we don’t understand but won’t give up trying to understand—that which … we are bound to imagine as a way of knowing it in spite of all’ (2008, 162; emphasis in original). In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed also argues against empathy, suggesting that it is the pain that ‘cannot be shared through empathy’ that calls for action (2004, 39).

I shall be concerned here with how humanitarian photographs ‘touch’ us through their materiality and also, in many cases, through what they evoke but do not show, inviting us to reconstruct the off-frame circumstances and to use our imagination to try to comprehend experiences that are not our own. My main point will be that the material and the off-frame are related, for it is the materiality of bodies and things—sometimes just of things—that refers us to what is beyond the image.

In humanitarian images that depict dead bodies, the materiality of corpses—living persons turned into inert matter—is evident. The photographs of child air raid victims mentioned previously illustrate the interplay between material presence (the bodies) and the unseen wider scenario that conditions the photographs’ content; the labels on the bodies make us aware that these children are laid out in a morgue with many other victims. Despite the use of such atrocity photographs by Republican propaganda agencies, however, photographs of dead bodies represent a surprisingly small proportion of the output of foreign photojournalists. An exception is a series of photographs taken by Gerda Taro in a Valencian morgue after an air raid in May 1937. I will discuss just two of them. The first depicts a male body lying face up, at a diagonal, on a tiled floor, partly covered by a bloodstained sheet and with blood trickling from his head. The materiality of the tiled floor, as well as of the inert body and blood, impacts us at a physiological level—we know that tiled floors are cold. The sight of the corpse laid out on the floor additionally makes us aware that there are so many dead bodies that the morgue does not have adequate space for them. Indeed, we can make out another female body partly underneath the male body that is the central focus. The second image (see Fig. 4.1) is of a pair of corpses laid out on a table, photographed with the camera held at the level of their feet which occupy the foreground; we cannot see their faces. The focus on the corpses’ feet, rather than on their faces, emphasises their conversion into inert matter. The bare feet of the body on the right function for me as the ‘punctum’: the detail that ‘pierces’ one. The disparity between the size of the feet of the two bodies, and what little one can make out of their clothing, implies that this is a man and a woman—presumably laid on the same table because they are a couple. The black clothing suggests that they are from the popular classes. These material details become their identities in the absence of their faces. However, when printing several photographs from this series, the French Communist magazine Regards—part of Münzenberg’s media empire—chose for the issue’s cover picture a photograph by Taro that did not show any dead bodies but a crowd pressing against the bars of the closed gates of Valencia’s main hospital after the same air raid, filmed from inside the gates so we see their distressed facial expressions. The impact of this image is all the greater for leaving off-frame the wounded or dead bodies that the relatives are so anxious to see, making readers want to turn the pages to see them too.

Fig. 4.1

Gerda Taro. Air raid victims in a Valencian morgue, May 1937. © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos TEST Pictures (rights managed)

Several Republican propaganda images rely on photomontage to make a material impact. The 1930s was, of course, the great age of photomontage, associated particularly, thanks to its use by the 1920s Soviet avant-garde, with Communist anti-fascist propaganda. An elementary use of photomontage was used in the previously mentioned poster showing a single child air raid victim, in that case superimposed on a skyscape with the outlines of planes inked onto it. Sebastiaan Faber (2018) has researched the recycling of photographic images for pro-Republican propaganda purposes, both by the Republic’s propaganda agencies and by foreign magazines and relief committees. It should be stressed that, once photojournalists sold or delivered their images to an agency or magazine, they had no control over their use (an exception is the photographs of Horna published in the anarchist magazine Umbral, where she was graphic editor). Faber’s main example is a montage, printed as the cover to the 1937 photo album Madrid issued by the Madrid Defense Junta, whose bottom-left corner is occupied by a nursing mother, amid a crowd, looking anxiously skyward, superimposed on a dramatic sky with planes inked on it and, to the right, a large swastika-daubed bomb falling (2018, 49). The bottom-left image is, in fact, a detail from a photograph taken by Chim at a land reform meeting in impoverished Extremadura two months before the civil war’s start: the woman suckling her baby is in fact craning her head to listen to the speakers on a raised platform. The juxtaposition of images transmits to us a fear of aerial bombardment that is not what the woman was feeling when photographed in May 1936. This cover picture is a perfect illustration of how photomontage creates new meaning by harnessing together disparate elements—it does not make visible an invisible emotion implicit in Chim’s photograph; it creates an emotion that was not in the scene captured by the camera at all. The collision of the upward impulse of the nursing mother’s skyward gaze and the downward impulse of the falling bomb enacts for us as spectators the explosion that the photomontage suggests is about to happen.

Azoulay notes the problem of images that become imagos: stock representations of particular types of suffering (here, that caused by aerial bombardment aimed at civilians, typecast in the mother-child dyad). Such stock representations impede the spectator’s establishment of a civil contract—a ‘shared space of personhood’—by lifting the human figures out of their circumstances. In the photograph just discussed, the Extremaduran peasants in May 1936 have become inhabitants of a Madrid under severe aerial bombardment in the winter of 1936–1937. The iconic October 1936 photograph of the child air raid victim suffered a similar decontextualisation when it was recycled in the 1937 Catalan Communist children’s magazine Mirbal with a caption describing the child as the victim of an air raid in Almería (Mendelson 2007, 181-182). Whether these decontextualisations matter is debatable; for Azoulay, they do. The decontextualisation does not detract from the images’ material impact, however.

I would like now to move to a very different set of images whose depiction of a vibrant materiality engages us sympathetically with the Republican figures portrayed. The impact of these photographs depends on the spectator’s awareness of the wartime context off-frame, giving the vitality a particular affective charge. My first example is from a series taken by Taro on the Aragon front in August 1936, in which she departs from her usual focus on battle scenes (she would herself be killed at the battle of Brunete in July 1937), here focusing on peasants at harvest time. The material vibrancy is produced by the workers’ energetic postures and above all by the grain caught in mid-air as it is tossed into the cart. This image achieves its effects through the contrast with the images of death and destruction expected of war photography, instead depicting the production of life in the form of food. My second example is another photograph of food, taken by the Catalan photojournalist Centelles outside Barcelona’s El Borne market, also in August 1936. It depicts two women and a man, in working clothes, holding open a sack while another woman fills it with aubergines from another sack brimming with produce in the foreground. The photograph’s message is that things are under control in Barcelona, despite the war. There is a kind of material symbiosis between the solidity of the human bodies and the glossy firmness of the aubergines that are the central focus.

My next example of an engaging vibrant materiality is also by Centelles. It depicts three militiawomen on the Aragon front in October 1936 (see Fig. 4.2). The women stand facing each other engaged in conversation, in baggy, wrinkled overalls, with their rifles slung over their shoulder or held in front of them. They are stocky and unglamorous. The photograph’s refusal to idealise its women combatants is striking, given the tendency in many representations of Republican militiawomen to depict them as exotic novelties, at a time when women’s membership of the military was unheard of. What strikes me in this photograph is the material solidity of the three women’s bodies, which occupy almost the entire frame. A further example of material vibrancy was chosen by Susie Linfield to illustrate the chapter on Robert Capa in her book on photography and political violence (2010, 174-177). She challenges Sontag’s attack on feeling as a response to war photography on the supposition that emotion is incompatible with critical reflection (2010, xiv-xv). Linfield argues that this mistrust of emotion disregards the feelings that have motivated the practitioners of documentary photography. She notes that, although Capa was billed by Picture Post as ‘the greatest war photographer in the world’, his best photos are not of battles but of ordinary people in the Republican zone, whether soldiers or civilians; Capa’s talent, she contends, is for communicating to spectators his own affective engagement with his photographic subjects (2010, 177). The photograph chosen by her shows a couple of POUM militiamen on the Aragon front dancing a lively Aragonese jota, with their comrades looking on enthusiastically.⁷ She singles out this photograph for its ability to capture the vitality of the dancing soldiers, which impacts us because we know that these men were fighting in precarious circumstances.

Fig. 4.2

Agustí Centelles. Militiawomen, Aragon front, October 1936. © Ministry of Culture and Education, Spain/Centro de Documentación de Memoria Histórica. Archivo Centelles, Foto 6452

These vibrant photographs need to be remembered since we have come to associate the Spanish Civil War with photographs of victims (refugees and those affected by air raid damage). Indeed, the many photographs of refugees taken during the Spanish Civil War established an iconography for the future: one that produces a symbiosis between the uprooted human figure and the bundle of material possessions he or she is carrying.⁸ The symbiosis can work in two directions: as a reduction of the refugee to the status of material thing, or as the animation of the material possessions as a synecdoche for the refugee carrying them. Either way, what strikes us in such images is the materiality of the possessions being transported, which serve as traces of a life left behind. One particular image by Capa—of a young girl curled up on a pile of sackcloth bundles, taken at a refugee transit centre in Barcelona on 15 January 1939—has been used on the cover of countless books about refugees, becoming an imago. In the case of such iconic images, we should heed Azoulay’s warning about the depersonalisation that occurs when an image is lifted out of its circumstances and comes to stand for a universal condition: in this case, that of the refugee. The context here is the advance of the Nationalist army on Barcelona, producing the exodus of half a million people over the Pyrenees to France. The fusion in this photo of the girl’s body with the bundles on which she is huddled touches us literally through the materiality of both.

This photograph is particularly interesting because Capa commented on the circumstances in which it was taken. He wrote: ‘She must be very tired, since she does not play with the other children; she does not stir. But her eye follows me, one large dark eye follows my every movement. It is difficult to work under such a look. It is not easy to be in such a place and not be able to do anything except record the suffering that others must endure’ (cited in Faber 2010, 405). Azoulay, keen to downplay the importance of the photographer as artist in favour of ‘the event of photography’, feels that the photographer’s attitude to what he or she is photographing is less important than what the spectator does with the image (2012, 47-54). There has, however, been endless controversy about whether photojournalists who sell their work for money are guilty of complicity with the suffering they depict. Here Capa shows himself to be sensitive to the issue of ‘regarding the pain of others’ (though he does describe them as ‘others’). In practice, his work played a large role in raising aid for the Republic. The head of the Republic’s Propaganda Delegation in Paris, Jaume Vicens, testified to Capa’s instrumentality in enabling the Republic to set this delegation up, and, while selling his photographs widely, Capa was a staff photographer for the Paris-based Ce Soir, created by the French Communist Party with Spanish Republican funding to raise support for the Republic (Lefebvre and Lebrun 2010, 77-78, 81-82). In 1938, also to raise support for the Republic, he published the photobook Death in the making in New York, accompanied by an exhibition at the New School for Social Research. A tribute to Taro, killed the previous year, it featured photographs by himself, Taro, and (uncredited) Chim; Capa wrote the captions (Young 2020). Capa’s photos were widely disseminated on postcards by aid organisations; the British National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief and the North American Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign, for example, printed postcards featuring the photographs he took in March 1939, just before the civil war’s end, of the detention camps where 200,000 Spanish Republican refugees were interned on the French Mediterranean coast (Faber 2010, 406). These photographs had been published widely in the international press, including an eight-page spread in the British magazine Picture Post (Faber 2010, 406). Capa himself donated money to the aid campaign of the French Welcome Committee for Spanish Intellectuals that was inspired by his photos of the French internment camps (Meléndez 2010, 398).

Capa took around 300 photos of the French camps, which are among those recovered in the ‘Mexican suitcase’ (see Note 3). The most striking, repeated feature is again the fusion of human bodies and precarious material possessions (see Fig. 4.3). Similar photographs were taken by the Catalan photojournalist Centelles of the camp at Bram, where he himself was interned as a refugee from March to September 1939, miraculously being allowed to keep his camera. During his internment he took some 600 photos (Centelles 2011, 101-106). Capa’s visit to Bram coincided with Centelles’ internment there, though he does not appear in any of Capa’s pictures. Photographing the camp at Bram from an insider perspective, Centelles’ images emphasise the materiality of the cramped conditions—as in a photo taken in his barracks at night, in which the human bodies and the blankets on the ground are barely distinguishable—or stress the internees’ physical vulnerability and resilience, including a self-portrait of himself brushing his teeth in pyjamas outside his barracks. Particularly interesting, but much less well known, are the photos taken in the French camp at Argelès in May 1939, just over a month after Franco declared victory, by the American woman photographer Ione Robinson, on behalf of the Republican Emigration Service in France which was arranging boats to take Republican refugees to Mexico. Robinson avoids depicting the abject conditions of the camps, preferring to convey the bodily vitality of the Republican internees. One photo depicts a handsome young Republican leaning out of the window of his wooden barracks; another captures two athletic males, one with naked torso seated on a crate and the other in a vest leaning towards him, both of them smiling. When Robinson subsequently visited an internment camp for Spanish Republican refugees in Algeria, again for the Republican Emigration Service, she took only one photo because she did not want to convey the despondency into which the internees had fallen (Cate-Arries 2004, 414). Robinson may have felt it important to give a positive image of the Republican detainees because the Republican Emigration Service needed to show that it was supplying Mexico with healthy citizens. Whatever the case, the result is a refusal of the pity that Azoulay has denounced for objectifying the human figures in images of suffering.

Fig. 4.3

Robert Capa. Republican refugees, Le Barcarès internment camp, southern France, March 1939. © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos TEST 02-Stock (Estate)

A number of photos of Republican refugees by foreign journalists use the diegetic gaze to draw viewers’ attention to off-frame space. This is the case with a photograph by Taro of refugees who had fled Málaga on foot on its February 1937 fall to the Nationalists. Those who reached Almería, 200 kilometres to the east, had survived the aerial strafing and shelling by gunboats of the refugee trail, in one of the worst atrocities of the war. The photo’s effect is produced by the gazes of the photographic subjects at off-frame spaces that condition their facial gestures and body language. The distraught mother surrounded by young children stands in the centre between an older woman and an injured man positioned on the ground, all of them staring at something off-frame to the right. In the lower foreground we see the head and shoulders of a boy who stares at the camera, interpellating us. This photograph, reproduced in a montage of photos of the Málaga refugees by Taro and Capa in Regards in March 1937, was re-used in cropped form on the cover of Willi Munzenberg’s Prague-based Communist magazine Die Volks-Illustrierte in June 1937, just after the fall of the Basque Country to the Nationalists. As Faber has noted (2018, 49), it is a rather shocking case of recycling in which the excision of the wounded male to the right of the original photo allows the caption to present it as of a Basque mother widowed in the Nationalist capture of Bilbao. The materiality of the body language remains eloquent, but the attribution of the photograph to another place and time turns the image into an imago, divorced from the photographic subjects’ circumstances.

Horna’s photographs, in particular, make brilliant use of the diegetic gaze to direct us to off-frame space. In an undated photograph taken at a refugee centre in Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real), two children, on the far left and right, interpellate us with their gaze at the camera. The gaze of the boy front right is hidden from us, arousing our curiosity. The boy in the centre stares avidly at something going on to his left that we cannot see; his bodily vitality, as well as giving him agency, draws our attention to the existence of an off-frame reality that explains what is happening. Something similar occurs in another photo by Horna of a teacher with young children crowding round her, all looking avidly ahead at something beyond the photograph’s left edge. They are shot at an angle, with the camera’s tilt giving the impression that they are being propelled towards this invisible off-frame space. A similar effect is produced by a further photo by Horna, part of a set taken in August 1937 at a maternity centre at Vélez Rubio (Almería) for mothers-to-be evacuated from Madrid and reproduced in an October 1937 double-page photo feature in Umbral (see Fig. 4.4). The nursing mother in the centre gazes anxiously at something to her right that we cannot see but whose presence affects us through the transmission of her anxiety. Horna’s ability to convey bodily vitality—in this photo, through the nursing mother’s sturdy physique—allows her to affirm life in the midst of precarity.

Fig. 4.4

Kati Horna. Maternity centre, Vélez Rubio, Almería, August 1937. Archivo Horna, Foto 103

Apart from refugees, the next most iconic topic in photographs of the Spanish Civil War is that of air raid damage. Such photos have an obvious humanitarian function in soliciting aid. The address to the spectator is made by the material debris itself. Horna took several photos of air raid debris in Barcelona. A particularly striking photo merges the animate with the inanimate through the triangular composition to the left, formed by the seated policeman and standing soldier next to a statue of the Virgin salvaged from the bombing. But what most literally touches the viewer in this photo is the jumble of debris to the right, spilling out in an almost animate fashion onto the sidewalk. The merging of animate and inanimate becomes threatening when we spot the outstretched arms among the debris—until we realise that this is not a human body but what appears to be a life-size doll, in a posture reminiscent of the crucifixion.

Commenting on the many photos of air raid damage by Capa and Taro, Juanjo Lahuerta praises their understanding of how loss can be conveyed eloquently through images devoid of human presence, for the material objects depicted point to ‘lives … suddenly abandoned’ (2010, 173). This is illustrated graphically in a photo by Capa in which all that remains of human life in the bombed-out house is a rocking chair, which functions as an image of loss of home. Another photo by Capa, reproduced on the cover of Regards in December 1936, depicts air raid damage in the working-class district of Vallecas, to Madrid’s south. A woman stands in front of the rubble that was once her home, pulling her jacket tightly round her (it is winter) and confronting the camera, and us, with a vacant stare. The debris overwhelms the human figure; the material remains speak to us, as they do to her. Perhaps the most subtle use of materiality to represent loss is found in a photograph by Horna of a bed in a field hospital on the Aragon front, taken in Spring 1937, whose evocation of absence through the lack of human figures combines with a life-affirming material solidity enhanced by the light pouring through the open window. The absent occupant of the bed—has he died, we wonder—makes his presence felt through the pin-ups of film stars on the wall and the suitcases and belongings on the shelving and bedside table. But what makes his absent presence tangible is the imprint of his body on the bed. I offer this photograph as a vivid illustration of how the materiality of things refers us to what is beyond the image, engaging our imagination to reconstruct a broader scenario that eludes us.

The impossibility of empathy—we are not and cannot be there, and our response to these photographs is coloured by ideas, emotions and experiences that are very different from those of Spaniards in the 1930s—becomes acute when we look at these photographs today, more than eighty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Nonetheless, the materiality of the images I have discussed ‘touches’ us in a way that invites us to reconstruct—that is, to imagine—the historical circumstances that, even if we are scholars of the Spanish Civil War, we can never fully know but that, with Didi-Huberman, we want and try to know ‘in spite of all’.