Francesc Català-Roca, Fiesta with the Chunga family, Montjüic, Barcelona 1955, with the Canadenca chimneys of the Paral.lel as a backdrop.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Retrophotograh of Hans Gutmann
Remarkable retrophotograph by Ulrich Eumann, an expert in the work of Hans Gutmann, better known in Spanish as Juan Guzmán. It shows several tiznaos (the name for vehicles armoured with steel plates) in Plaça Catalunya on 20 July 1936 combined with the square today complete with a Bus Turístic. It is amazing that within one of day of the coup the anarchist workers set to welding these plates on trucks and luxury Hispano-Suizos. More here in German
Ione Robinson in Barcelona
Child in Barcelona 1938 by Ione Robinson.
“In September 1938, Robinson arrived in Barcelona. Over the course of two months, Robinson produced a series of drawings and paintingsin the Catalan munitions factories, refugios, hospitals; and on the Ebro front with the Republican 5th Army . As she writes in her 1946 memoir, A Wall to Paint On, “…in the drawings I have made here in Spain I have tried to express-through simple line-the agonizing effect of war upon the innocent victims: the women and children…through what I felt and saw in their eyes-and hands.” She left Spain at the end of October, 1938.” More here http://ionerobinson.org/
Italian bombing of Barcelona in court
A Barcelona court wants Italy to apologise for the war crime of mass bombardment during the civil war, in support of General Franco. The picture shows the destruction casued by the March 1938 Coliseum bomb. More here in The Guardian
Guillermo Zúñiga
Photo by Guillermo Zúñiga, somewhere on the Madrid Front.
More information here about the discovery of this remarkable photographer, who has been called the Robery Capa of Madrid
http://www.publico.es/390260/guillermo-zuniga-ha-nacido-otro-capa Plus brilliant archive here: http://www.publico.es/especial/lopez-zuniga/
Canute Frankson
(to my dear friend).
Albacete, Spain, July 6, 1937.
Street sign guerillas
Martha Gellhorn on the Spanish maquis
Referring to the contribution of the Spanish Maquis to the French resistance movement, Martha Gellhorn wrote in The Undefeated (1945):
“During the German occupation of France, the Spanish Maquis engineered more than four hundred railway sabotages, destroyed fifty-eight locomotives, dynamited thirty-five railway bridges, cut one hundred and fifty telephone lines, attacked twenty factories, destroying some factories totally, and sabotaged fifteen coal mines. They took several thousand German prisoners and – most miraculous considering their arms – they captured three tanks. In the south-west part of France where no Allied armies have ever fought, they liberated more than seventeen towns.”