A new feature film titled The Girl With the Leica premiered at the Venice Film Festival, casting fresh light on pioneering war photographer Gerda Taro. The debut coincides with new historical research suggesting Taro, rather than her partner Robert Capa, captured his most famous Spanish Civil War photograph.
She was one of the most fearless photojournalists of the 20th century and the first known to have been killed while covering a war. Yet throughout history, the work of Gerda Taro has often been overshadowed by the collaborator and lover whose professional alias she invented.
From Paris Exiles to the Spanish Civil War
Long before their names became synonymous with mid-century war photography, Taro and Capa started as refugees navigating the tightening grip of fascism in Europe. Born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart in 1910, Taro fled to Paris after Hitler’s rise to power, crossing paths with Endre Friedmann, a struggling Hungarian-Jewish photographer born in Budapest in 1913 (The Guardian).
The pair fell in love, and Friedmann taught Taro the fundamentals of photography. Faced with rising political intolerance and a desire to break into the lucrative American market, Taro devised a clever commercial strategy.
In order to overcome the increasing political intolerance prevailing in Europe and get access to the lucrative American market, they decided to get rid of their Jewish surnames and started to sell their pictures using the fictional name
Robert Capa.As Manuel Sechi
The pseudonym was designed to evoke a seasoned, hard-drinking American war correspondent, drawing partly on the Hungarian word for shark (The Guardian). Though their ruse was eventually discovered, the pair continued working under shared branding, covering the front lines together as the most celebrated visual chroniclers of the Spanish civil war.
Bringing The Girl With the Leica to the Venice Lido
Decades later, Taro’s contributions take center stage in a new cinematic adaptation. Directed by Italian filmmaker Alina Marazzi, The Girl With the Leica received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, drawing from Helena Janeczek’s 2018 novel.
German actress Emilia Schüle stars as Taro, bringing depth to a narrative that centers around Bastille Day, July 14, 1937, while incorporating flashbacks to her youth in Leipzig, her left-wing activism, and her subsequent arrest.
Marazzi noted that Taro balanced a lively personal presence with fierce political commitment. Among her most iconic visual records is a series documenting female militia members training on a beach outside Barcelona in August 1936, including a kneeling fighter steadying a pistol while wearing high heels (The Guardian).
Fresh Attribution Claims Over The Falling Soldier
The film’s festival bow arrives alongside intense scholarly debate regarding the most famous photograph credited to the Robert Capa alias. Published by Life magazine in July 1937, The Death of a Militiaman—also widely known as The Falling Soldier—purportedly captured the exact instant a Republican fighter was shot by Francisco Franco’s forces near Córdoba.
Fernando Penco Valenzuela, a Spanish historian and archivist in Córdoba, argues that technical evidence points directly to Taro as the photographer. Penco’s analysis indicates the picture was shot on a square-format Reflex-Korelle camera—which Taro owned and wore the day the couple arrived in the village of Espejo—rather than Friedmann’s rectangular 35mm Leica.
A 2025 Madrid retrospective curated by Magnum, the agency Capa cofounded in 1947, noted that while some prints of the image were rectangular, others featured dimensions suggesting the negative originated from a 6×6 camera (The Guardian). Based on an attribution of all square-format frames from that assignment to Taro, Penco maintains that the iconic image was shot by Taro, further fueling long-running speculation that the controversial photograph may have been staged due to an absence of active fighting in the area on September 5, 1936.
Tragic Parallels and Enduring Mythologies
Both photographers left behind a legacy defined by proximity to danger. Capa famously established a guiding rule for photojournalism: If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough
.
That cavalier approach to front-line documentation proved fatal for both. Taro was fatally wounded on the frontline of the Spanish civil war in 1937 during the Battle of Brunete, while Capa was killed years later by a land mine in Indochina in 1954.
As biographical novels and cinematic projects continue to examine their partnership, literary and photographic experts note that the real history remains complex. Photographic historian Jimmy Fox has previously cautioned against overly sugarcoated romantic adaptations, pointing out that their bohemian circle involved multifaceted relationships and deep professional independence. With Marazzi’s biopic now screening for international audiences, viewers and researchers alike are re-evaluating the distinct artistic footprint of a photographer who helped construct the Capa legend while carving out her own indispensable place in history.
