‘Una estética del poder’: Photographic construction, propaganda and ideology during the Spanish Civil War During the course of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first war and photography have become inseparable and it was the Spanish Civil War that was the first war to be witnessed in a modern sense. A corps of professional photographers, among them Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, David Seymour and Kati Horna, covered the front line as well as those towns and cities under bombardment and their photographs were then published in newspapers and magazines in Europe and beyond, thus constituting the most important source of information on the Spanish conflict. The above photographers produced images that portrayed both the horrifically sordid and the appallingly absurd aspects of this fratricidal war, in a dichotomic amalgam of the real and the surreal. Combined with text, fragmented or placed in juxtaposition with other images, these photographs and others like them formed ‘una estética del poder’1 and were used by both the Nationalist and Republican cause respectively as a weapon in this ideological battle. I. The surreal, the symbolic and the sordid Photographs come in many guises: as fine art, photo journalism and as evidence in legal proceedings among many others but what is fundamental in every photograph is that they are all a ‘means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality.’2 On one hand, photographs are an enduring fragment of a past reality and present the viewer with an insight into the way things were: even if the image distorts this view of the past, one can always be certain that something exists, or used to exist, which is similar to what is seen in the photograph. On the other hand, however, as Sontag suggests: Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.3 She goes on to posit that what makes a photograph in itself surreal is the ‘distance imposed, and bridged […], the social distance and the distance in time.’4 This aspect of Surrealism plays with our concrete notions of time and space: what we take to be true and certain in our everyday lives. One of the aims of the Surrealist movement was to enhance the strangeness in the everyday so that the familiar is rendered unfamiliar and peculiar. It is like seeing a room in one’s home inverted in a mirror; the furniture is in its correct position and the windows open out onto the same view but we cannot shake the feeling that what we see is new, strange and different. Photographers documenting the devastation of the Civil War top Spain’s infrastructure created Surrealist visions in images of bombed houses with no façades. Photographs of the damage inflicted on the urban face of Spain during a time of relentless bombardments were endlessly featured in the foreign press, particularly in France and Britain, and seemed to posses a certain fascinating quality. Image 1 is a Robert Capa photograph of a bombed apartment in which framed images remain hanging on the wall and a vase of flowers sits undisturbed on a plant stand. The only ostensible thing wrong with this image, alerting the viewer as to why Capa recorded it, is that the door has been blown in and the rooms below and above the one the camera focuses on are visible; the ceilings and floors as if sliced away by a knife. By destroying huge parts of this building and sparing small items within it, the bomb creates a Surrealist landscape and the viewer recognizes the surreal contradiction that:
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