Lost Spanish Civil War Negatives Found After 68 Years
A cache of 4,500 negatives by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour, missing since 1939, was recovered in Mexico City and delivered to the
In December 2007, the International Center of Photography in New York received three cardboard boxes containing 126 rolls of 35mm film and roughly 4,500 negatives lost since 1939. The material, known as the Mexican Suitcase, holds a visual record of the Spanish Civil War shot by photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David "Chim"Seymour. ## The Content and Significance of the Find
The three flat boxes contained film shot mostly between May 1936 and the spring of 1939."Robert Capa"to sell Friedmann's work in a Paris market hostile to Jewish emigres. Taro acted as the agent for this persona."Chim."All three covered Republican Spain from 1936, working closely with small cameras in the middle of events. This intimate, modern approach kept them in danger."Csiki" Weisz. When German forces approached Paris in the spring of 1940, Weisz placed the negatives in a rucksack and bicycled to Bordeaux. He later wrote, "I met a Chilean in the street and asked him to take my film packages to his consulate for safekeeping."
The exact route is unclear, but the boxes eventually reached General Francisco Aguilar González, a Mexican diplomat. He took them to Mexico City, where they remained forgotten for decades. Weisz also ended up in Mexico, dying in early 2007, months before the boxes were recovered.
The negatives resurfaced through Mexican filmmaker Benjamin Tarver, who inherited them from a relative. Curator Trisha Ziff mediated between Tarver and the ICP, finally delivering the boxes to New York on December 19, 2007. They were handed to Cornell Capa, Robert's brother and ICP's founder.
Clarifying Photographic Attribution
The recovered rolls helped sharpen the attribution of work between Capa and Taro. Because they shared a working life and Taro died young, much of her work had been absorbed into the Capa legend. The notebooks, assignment labels, and frame order on the rolls allowed researchers to separate her frames from his with new precision.
This evidence allowed Taro's coverage, such as her photographs of the training of the new People's Army near Valencia in early 1937, to be credited to her with far greater confidence. The find provided a large new body of evidence for ongoing scholarly work, which had already begun with a major Taro retrospective at the ICP three months before the suitcase arrived.
