Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Vaill Amanda

Author:Vaill, Amanda [Vaill, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

July 1937: Paris

Coming out of the Gare d’Austerlitz into the cool gray evening drizzle, Gerda found that the copies of Ce Soir in the news kiosks around the Place Valhubert were full of her pictures of Brunete. Ce Soir had been featuring her all week, in fact: her very first Brunete photos on the eighth, as well as images from the Writers’ Congress on the ninth and the eleventh. At the studio on the rue Froidevaux there was more good news: Capa’s photograph of the falling militiaman had been reprinted as the sole accompaniment to an editorial in Life magazine marking the first anniversary of Franco’s uprising: “DEATH IN SPAIN: THE CIVIL WAR HAS TAKEN 500,000 LIVES IN ONE YEAR”; her stills of the Granjuela reenactment would be in Ce Soir (presented as a real-life attack on an unnamed village), and Regards—which had already given her photos of the Valencia bombing victims a prominent spread—would be including her photos and Capa’s in its own anniversary issue, due to appear on Bastille Day. What a contrast to their situation a year ago! Then they had been poor and unknown, refugees ekeing out an existence on the margins; now they had become the person they had invented, the famous international photographer—no, two famous international photographers, each with a name to conjure with. Even Gerda’s anxieties about her family appeared on their way to a solution: they had applied for clearance to emigrate from Yugoslavia, where they were living with her mother’s parents, to Palestine.

As if all this good fortune weren’t enough, Capa had had another of his ideas, this time about something even more ambitious than their original expedition to Spain. On July 7, just days ago, the Empire of Japan—an ally of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, hungry for territory and historically opposed to Russia—had declared war on China; this war was going to be a big story, he knew it, and no European or American journalists were on the spot yet. He’d had gone to see Richard de Rochemont of Life and had asked him to send the two of them to cover it. De Rochemont had promised him an answer soon. It would mean a long sea voyage to a place unlike any they’d ever been to; it would be just the two of them, far from home; but they would be working together, on Life’s masthead alongside Alfred Eisenstadt and Margaret Bourke-White; Life paid well, and their photographs would be seen by millions of readers. Would Gerda do it?

If Capa had worried about Gerda’s diffidence, her self-protectiveness, her need to put personal and professional distance between them, he need not have. She couldn’t wait to go. She just had to return to Spain to see the Loyalists win at Brunete and get those pictures; but she’d only stay ten days. Then she’d come straight back to Paris; by then Capa should have good news from Life and they’d start packing for China. She didn’t promise more than that; and perhaps he was wise enough not to ask.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.