Spanish Civil War Photographs

The Mandeville Special Collections Library has a link to an interesting discussion of the use of photography in the Spanish Civil War that includes photographs taken by anonymous news agency photographers of the time. Worth looking at in relation to well-known photographers from the time, such as Capa. Here's a chunk of the discussion: In a recent pioneering study on the use of Spanish Civil War photographs in selected French and British periodicals, Caroline Brothers notes, "whether to intervene was a question theoretically tied to public opinion, at least in the foreign democracies, and since this opinion was informed at least as much by images as by text, the press photographs of the Spanish Civil War can be understood as weapons rather than simple illustrations." She continues on the importance of photographs in foreign democracies, "with seemingly everyone from writers to politicians to the Liverpudlian unemployed taking sides over Spain, the civil war took on an unprecedented urgency in the way it was lived and believed in and represented. More than any previous war and possibly any war since, photographs of Spain became images not just of but in conflict. And none of them was indifferent." Thus, the intensity of the photographs derives not only from what they depict but also from the politically and ideologically charged historical context out of which they emerged.

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