University of Cambridge Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos Part II 2011 Year Abroad Project (Dissertation)
‘Una estética del poder’: Photographic construction, propaganda and ideology during the Spanish Civil War
Candidate Number:
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‘Una estética del poder’: Photographic construction, propaganda and ideology during the Spanish Civil War In the twenty-first century war and photography have become inseparable. (SSp167) I. The surreal, the symbolic and the sordid The Spanish Civil War 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. Their photographs were then published in newspapers and magazines in Europe and beyond and constituted the most important source of information on the Spanish conflict. The above photographers produced images that portrayed both the horrific and the appallingly absurd aspects of this fratricidal war, in a dichotomic amalgam of the real and the surreal. These images were often presented in foreign publications with text in the form of a caption explaining the photographs which, as a whole, were of the nature of propaganda. 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.’1 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.2 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.’3 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 photograph by Robert Capa 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: walls now acted as windows, floors as window ledges, […] that doorways led to
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nowhere and that roofs provided no protection from the elements.4 The interior of this apartment has been opened up to the outside world, turning a private space into an anonymous public one in what Caroline Brothers calls ‘an eruption of the absurd into daily urban life.’5 The privacy of the individual has been lost in the overwhelming technological power of the bomb. This absurd loss of privacy is demonstrated by the presence of the prying eye of the camera and, through it, our prying eyes as viewers. Image 2, a photograph taken in Lérida by Kati Horna, shows the façade of a bombed apartment block. The wallpapered walls of people’s homes have been exposed by the blast and, on the top floor, what appears to be a framed painting or photograph remains hanging on the wall, intact: the door to its left would now open only onto a void where a room used to be. Even the trees, all apart from one to the left of the photograph, have been destroyed and point bare limbs towards the sky, as if they were pointing the finger at the bombers responsible. On the right hand side of the photograph a standard lamp and bookshelves can just be discerned in one of the rooms and in others there are more pieces of furniture that have been displaced from their usual positions by the force of the blast. In the street below the bombed building, however, a woman sifts through a pile of household items – mattresses, chests and various items of clothing – perhaps searching for the precious objects she has lost in this aberration from the ‘accepted order and appearance of the urban environment.’6 Objects appear displaced, resulting in surreal and illogical juxtapositions that are accepted as a consequence of war. Caroline Brothers has suggested that images such as these stand as an iconographical record of devastation, illustrating but not explaining the manner in which all content had been excavated from the city’s structures until their very description as buildings became an antilogy approaching the absurd.7 The camera captures the tragic realism of the situation for the inhabitants of these buildings but in a surrealistic way that struck a chord with foreign readers of publications from around the world. It records the reality of what is no longer and, through its depiction of devastation to buildings, reminds the viewer of something that used to exist but exists no longer. This is the defining feature of a photograph: it is a tangible reminder of the past that prevents it from being lost completely. This is why people take photographs of their loved ones and of happy events: to remember them when they have been erased by time or distance. Photographs are both a tangible object but are also symbolic of a past reality and, like paintings and other works of art, they can contain symbols for the viewer to decode. During the Spanish Civil War photographers took pains to present soldiers as being heroic and brave as well as being conscious of conforming to tacit rules of taste. Caroline Brothers states that ‘news photographs are used almost exclusively as evidence’8, however, photojournalists documented injury and death inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike and their images were used in the same way as those of war-torn buildings in foreign publications; mainly to provoke sympathy for Spain in Europe. Pages in British and French publications reporting on the Spanish Civil War were largely sanitized due to some images being judged by editors as being too shocking for public consumption. Thus, the representation of war injury and death was euphemistic in tone and symbols were used to depict death. In an image published by Reynolds’ News in 1936 a single soldier is seen approaching the photographer carrying four rifles. The caption is vital for our understanding of the image. Titles ‘After the Battle’ it reads: Bringing home his old comrades’ rifles on the outskirts of Madrid. Each rifle symbolizes a dead soldier. There also appeared photographs such as Image 3 by Kati Horna in which Horna portrays an injured soldier on a stretcher, covered over completely with a blanket, acting as a barrier between our eyes and the truth of the extent of his injury. The soldier’s dishevelled hair and facial
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expression inform us that he is wounded but, essentially, he functions as a symbol of bravery in the face of suffering. Photographs such as this one provoked sympathy in the public who saw them but did not cross the line between taste and the desire to shock. Image 4 by Robert Capa is of a dying soldier dictating his last words to a comrade. There is some blood on the bandage on the soldier’s head but the blood and the bandage are merely symbols of the man’s true suffering and the viewer does not see the full extent of his wounds. Capa keeps his distance from the two men, not wanting to intrude into the scene and so the viewer feels removed from the photograph as though it were not real. This photograph was featured in the British magazine Picture Post on 3 December 1938 with the caption: But for this man it is the end: A dying man gives his last letter. He will never go home again. He will never write any letters after this one. He speaks a few broken sentences. A comrade listens, tries to catch his meaning, jots the words down. Later he will contrive to send them home. Another brave man has met his end. The caption is so awash with pathos that it does not let the photograph speak for itself and manages to draw the reader’s attention away from the injury itself, which becomes a secondary theme. Unashamedly propagandistic, the caption only gives one interpretation of the image it is attached to. Godard and Gorin assert that all images are ‘physically mute’9 and only talk through the mouth of the caption beneath them but in images of the Civil War pictures speak louder than words; the words only strengthen the message to render it a more powerful piece of propaganda. Naked reality is rarely pleasant but some publications, particularly French ones such as Regards, were prepared to publish images of the horrors of war, which can only be described as sordid. The images themselves seem to ‘express disgust at their own sordidness.’10 Surrealism is the ‘art of generalizing the grotesque and then discovering nuances (and charms) in that’11 and some photographers followed this Surrealist idea in their desire to shock society by whatever means possible. The British publication The Daily Worker published on 12 November 1936 undoubtedly some of the most sordid photographs of the war and felt the need to justify why they printed them (Image 5). The images are identification photographs of children killed in the raid on the town of Getafe, outside Madrid, on 30 October 1936. Here there is no symbolism to represent death and no euphemism to soften the blow to the viewer’s senses. Blood stains their faces, their clothing and the ground; the eyes of some are open. The identification labels on their chests a sign of their new status as objects to be catalogued to be utilized as propaganda and evidence. The images were taken as proof of Nationalist barbarity; their juxtaposition with a photograph of an English child playing in the sun and the caption ‘Nazi Bomb Kills Seventy Spanish Children’ reinforcing the message. The Catalan photographer Agustí Centelles, who worked directly for the propaganda services of the Catalan Autonomous Government, captured a similar photograph of the victims of the bombardment on Lleida in November 1937 (Image 6). Like Capa, Centelle’s aesthetic is one of ‘commitment and proximity.’ 12 Our eyes are drawn to three children in the centre of the image whose faces are uncovered: the viewer could take them as sleeping if it were not for the streaks of blood on their cheeks and temples. The second child even appears to be smiling slightly as though dreaming but the third’s eyes are still open and gazing at nothing, making us believe the unbelievable, that this child is dead. Roland Barthes has discussed what he calls a photograph’s punctum13 (the Latin term for a ‘sting’, ‘speck’ or ‘cut’), or that which is striking and poignant to the viewer. All photographs of the Spanish Civil War have a punctum because of their pathos but none more so than Images 5 and 6 which both possess a tragic realism that arrests our gaze and haunts us. Unlike Image 4 and 5 with their captions and juxtaposed photograph, Image 6 is allowed to speak for itself and, through the viewfinder, even this, a grotesque scene, acquires an aura of pathos simply because it has selected by Centelles as worthy of being photographed.
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Brothers suggests that the aesthetic quality of the photograph ‘neutralizes their power to disturb and makes the unpalatable tolerable’14 but only to a limit: when the viewer really looks at the image, no amount of aesthetically pleasing composition can detract from the sordidness of what was captured on film. All photographs of the Spanish Civil War, whether they are surreal, symbolic or sordid, have a special relationship with reality but it is the sordid that represented reality in such a shocking way that grotesque images had more power over the thoughts and emotions of the Spanish public and people in other European countries in the form of propaganda. However, Sontag has argued recently that: The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar.15 After repeated exposure to gruesome photographs we have lost our sense of moral outrage in the face of the horrific realities of war, starvation and natural disaster: the images have become banal and remote, less real: in some cases, they seem one dimensional. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, the technique of photomontage was developed in Europe by artists who, through their art, ‘committed their imagination to the service of a mass political struggle.’16 The way in which different types of image were taken from various sources and combined forced people to truly look at photographs, tiny pieces of reality, and to see in them, the true horrors of war and Fascism in Europe. II. ‘A provocative dismembering of reality’ Photomontage began in the 1930s with the Berlin Dadaists (Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield among others) who used the photograph as a ready-made image, arranging it with cuttings from magazines and newspapers as well as other artwork, creating a new image. The separate parts, which then acted as symbols, clearly did not originally belong together and so, in perceiving this, the viewer is forced to consider the symbols used, why they have been placed together and what the whole image is trying to convey. Text was also combined with images to reinforce this message; similar to the way in which, as we have already seen, captions gave an interpretation of photographs in European publications. Photomontage is a form of political satire, a didactic weapon of propaganda and, through its use of fragmentation, combination and symbolism, it conveys a message about war and political struggle almost as powerful as that of shocking documentary photographs of the dead and injured. It has already been established that photographs imprison reality and make time stand still but photomontage as an art form has much common ground with surrealism as well as realism The Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta stated in 1988: It’s no use going out into the street with your camera on your shoulder to see the world in a new way. In photographic terms, reality has had its day; we must construct new realities.17 This is what photomontage does: it takes photographs, tangible pieces of a past reality, out of their original context and locates them in a new one alongside other photographs, magazine or newspaper cuttings and text to create something entirely new. Dawn Ades comments that ‘it is clear that the photograph has a […] privileged place in relation to reality but that it is susceptible to being manipulated to re-organise or dis-organise that reality.’ 18 She goes on to describes the new image created by this reorganization as ‘chaotic, explosive […], a
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provocative dismembering of reality.’19 Photomontage is a combative art that comments on the appearance of society, unveiling the reality behind it through political satire; it conveys a message about social realism. The photomonteur takes fragments of images that do not reveal anything of society’s hidden mechanisms and arranges them to articulate something about that same society. (page 38 photocopied page). The eminent photomonteur John Heartfield declared in 1958, ‘I am for realism and as a party artist […] I am for socialist realism.’20 ‘Fragmentation is a commonplace of Surrealist art’21 and the photomonteur is the orchestrator of the fragmentation of images and their harmonious combination in a photomontage. Thus, he toys with realism and surrealism and uses theses concepts to provoke first laughter in his viewer, for photomontage is often witty and has much in common with caricature, and then deep thought in his audience. Photomontage also ‘transforms relationships between familiar objects, upsets the scale and suggests strange spatial effects.’22 All of the separate elements of a photomontage work together to convey something about society or to pass on a propagandist message but the viewer realises that these elements did not originally belong together; the scale or the perspective between two photographic fragments may be wrong had these two items been placed together in real life, the tone of one part of a black and white photograph may be different to that of another, the mixture of painting or drawing with photographs all indicate that manipulation of various media has resulted in a surreal aspect, one that the viewer believes to be real on first sight and on second inspection realises to be surreal. Montage, then, stands for ‘the fragmentation of […] an everyday reality that has suddenly burst into the frame of experience.’23 Bertolt Brecht described as realist any art work which helped the viewer grasp reality and so photomontage arranges realist elements in a surrealist manner in order to convey message about a social reality. It is through the fragmentation of what is real that the viewer really pays attention to what the montage is trying to say; the odd scale and perspective, tones or combination of different media pull the viewer up short and force them to really look. (use JH photomontage of baskenland and insert Max Ernst section with commentary on some of his work) It is this dismembering of reality that renders the photograph itself visible: the viewer normally does not look at a photograph, instead what a photograph contains, however, photomontage points out the incongruity of the fragments that form part of the whole piece of artwork and they are no longer invisible. Each fragment was placed by the photomonteur alongside other fragments for a reason and each fragment is rendered symbolic; it has a purpose in the photomontage, a message to convey. (lead onto symbolism) When leading into John Heartfield’s work and commenting on it, mention that JH worked for AIZ between 1930 and 19??, producing photomontages that created a comic vision of society/used traditional caricature and photography to comment of the realities of his society, unveiling the reality behind the appearance. In 1931 Bertolt Brecht wrote a note to AIZ on its tenth anniversary of publication. He wrote that ‘the camera can lie just like the type-setting machine. The task of AIZ to serve truth and reproduce the real facts is of immense importance, and, it seems to me, has been achieved splendidly.’(photocopied page 11). Heartfield’s ‘inherently comic hybrid form […] drew on, but also undermined, photography’s claims to represent the truth.’ (photocopied page 20)
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Why is photomontage so successful as propaganda? ‘The photograph is never anything but an anticipation of “Look”, “See”, “Here it is”; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis and cannot escape this pure deictic language.’ (Rbarthes, p. 5) It is, therefore, not surprising that photomontage was so successful as propaganda; we assume that images point to the truth and so they are a powerful way of getting people to believe something/take on a mindset. III. ‘Un grito pegado a la pared’ Title quote: Fundación Pablo Iglesias, Carteles de la guerra 1936-1939 (Madrid: Lunwerg, 2004), p. 28 Introduction: I. The surreal, the symbolic and the sordid 1. John Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’ in Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 182. 2. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London, Penguin Books, 1979), p. 52. 3. Sontag, p. 58. 4. Caroline Brothers, ‘Semiology and the City at War’ in War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 116. 5. Brothers, p. 115. 6. Brothers, p. 112. 7. Brothers, p. 115. 8. Brothers, ‘Casualties and the Nature of Photographic Evidence’ in War and Photography: A Cultural History, p. 161. 9. Sontag, p. 108. 10. Berger, ‘The Political Uses of Photo-montage’ in Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, p. 184. 11. Sontag, p. 74. 12. Publio López Mondejar, 150 Years of Photography in Spain (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 2000), p. 168. 13. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography (London: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 27. 14. Brothers, ‘Casualties and the Nature of Photographic Evidence’ in War and Photography: A Cultural History, p. 170. 15. Sontag, pp.20-21. 16. Berger, ‘The Political Uses of Photo-montage’ in Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, p. 184. II. ‘A provocative dismembering of reality 17. Públio López Mondejar, Photography in Franco’s Spain (English edition - London: Könemann, 1999), p. 99 18. Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 66 19. Ades, pp. 12-13 20. David Evans, John Heartfield: AIZ/VI 1930-38 (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1992), p. 29 21. Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 88 22. Ades, p. 17 23. Matthew Teitelbaum (ed.), Montage and Modern Life (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), p. 31
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III. ‘Un grito pegado a la pared’ Works cited – Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Howard, Richard (London: Vintage Books, 2000), pp. 3-4, 82, 85, 87, 96, 115. Berger, John, Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 182. Burke, Carolyn, Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), pp. 90-91, 205. (need to cite English edition and translator) López Mondejar, Publio, 150 Years of Photography in Spain, (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 2000), p163. (need to cite English edition and translator) López Mondejar, Publio, Photography in Franco’s Spain, pp. 20, 78. Schaber, Irme, and others, eds., Gerda Taro (Göttingen, Steidl, 2007), pp. 9-10. Sontag, Susan, On Photography, (London, Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 4-6, 15, 19, 51, 109, 154, 156, 163, 164. (check if there are editors) Ministerio de Cultura, Kati Horna: Fotografías de la guerra civil española (1937-1938) (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1992), p. 9. Greeley, Robin, Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 2 (am I going to use this?) Evans, David and Grohl, Sylvia, Photomontage: A Political Weapon (London: Fraser, 1986), p. 35 Images Image 1 – Merin, Peter (Oto Bihalji-Merin), Spain between Death and Birth (New York: Dodge, 1938), p. Image 2 – (eds?) Ministerio de Cultura, Kati Horna: Fotografías de la guerra civil española (1937-1938) (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1992), p. 88 Image 3 – (eds?) Ministerio de Cultura, Kati Horna: Fotografías de la guerra civil española (1937-1938) (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1992), p. 35 Image 4 – Whelan, Richard, This is war! Robert Capa at Work (Göttingen: Steidl, 2007), p.146? Image 5 – Own photo taken in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid/ Brothers, Caroline, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 177 Image 6 – (check editors) from La Fábrica – Obra Social Caja Madrid ed., Biblioteca de Fotógrafos Españoles – Agustí Centelles (Madrid: 55 Fotografías +, 1999), Image 45 Second Section:
Title from Ades, Dawn, Photomontage (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), pp. 12-13
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