Aventura 9: La Maleta Mexicana

On the same day as the trip to the top of Montjuic, I explored more of the mountain, but this time the base of it, at the Museo Nacional de Catalunya.  And I even continued with el tema de la Guerilla Civil de España when I went to this exhibit:

http://ago2.com/blog/index.php/la-maleta-mexicana/

This was really an incredible, incredible exhibit.  The Mexican Suitcase recounts an amazing adventure, a larger one than I could ever account for on this blog.  This suitcase, discovered in Mexico in 2007, that contained over 4,500 photo negatives during the Spanish Civil War.  The three photojournalists that took all these photos were Robert Capa, Chim, and Gerda Taro (Taro was one the first well-known female photojournalist in Spain).  Capa rescued these negatives, fleeing Spain in 1939 to Mexico, yet it wasn't until decades later that it was discovered.

http://espaciocusachs.blogspot.com/2011/11/la-maleta-mexicana.html

http://www.railowsky.com/fotografia/3541-la-maleta-mexicana-de-robert-capa-2-tomos-.html

Many of these photos had turned up in magazines during the war, in Life magazine in the United  States or in other magazines and newspapers around the world.  But what's amazing about this exhibit is how the negatives provide a sequence, a power that these individual photos alone don't have.

http://coberturaphoto.blogspot.com/2011/11/libro-del-mes-cobertura-photo-la-maleta.html

This power of the narrative and of the sequence was amazing for me to see.  But the power of what these photo journalists did, of seeing these photos in Spain, was amazing.  But I really cannot imagine being someone who lives in Spain, who had family living in Spain during this time or having lived through this time, and looking at these photos.  I really cannot imagine it.  What would it be like having this terrible time up in a museum? Where some people see it as a spectacle, others as a memory, but of a time period that was for the first decades after the war wanted to be forgotten? This exposition shared an incredible adventure, but I think it's only started many for me.