Telling the old, old, old stories
Capa and Taro lived, loved and died on the frontline, becoming the most famous war photographers of their time. As a new novel about them is published, we explore their real relationship.
This is fascinating - and also distressing about the way the relationship is sentimentalised and monogamised in the forthcoming novel - but I don't think O'Hagan gets an entire pass on telling it like it is.
E.g. is it really necessary to refer to Gerta Pohorylle, subsequently Gerda Taro, as 'a petite redhead with a winning smile' on her encounter with the 'scruffy young charmer', André Friedmann, later Robert Capa. And did they really constitute 'the most iconic relationship in the history of photography'???
It does, however, sound as though there was a much more interesting story there than the ro-mance version.
And on other old, old stories that keep rising from the grave: O Teh Pore Menz! resurfaces: shoot it with silver bullets, sow the ground with salt, and still it rises. (And it goes back a good deal further than suggested: DH Lawrence and Capt Antony Ludovici and others were banging on about this in the 1920s.)
Yay for Tim Sullivan on the topic:
Tim Samuels, for one, readily concedes that we tolerate jokes about men that wouldn't be made about women or ethnic minorities "because men haven't faced hundreds of years of persecution".
"We shouldn't lose our sense of humour over this," says Samuels. "A few gags on Loose Women aren't going to signal the demise of mankind."
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