The New York Times‘s Randy Kennedy looks into the “Mexican Suitcase” the International Center for Photography has been unpacking to learn more about Robert Capa, the Magnum photo agency and the birth of war photography:
What the center’s scholars have found among the 126 rolls over the last several months are a number of previously unknown shots by Capa, one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency and a pioneering war photographer, and by Taro, his professional partner and companion, who died in 1937 when she was struck by a tank near the front, west of Madrid. [ . . . ] For Capa and Taro the newly discovered negatives are providing a way to make sense of their jumbled archive of images from the Spanish Civil War, in which dates, sequences and even attributions have remained uncertain. Much of their known work from those years was organized in nine notebooks of contact prints with little identifying information. (One of the notebooks is at the center; the others are at the French national archives in Paris.)
Because the rolls in the boxes show sequential shots from much of all three photographers’ most famous work from the war, it also allows scholars to “see how their eyes were working as they shot these stories,” Ms. Young said. “And I really think that’s the most interesting thing in this project, to see their thought process.”
New Works by Photography’s Old Masters (New York Times)
