On Rai5 a documentary on Gerda Taro, the recently rediscovered photojournalist companion of Robert Capa

On Friday, Jan. 14 at 9:15 p.m. on Rai5, another episode of Art Night, the program hosted by Neri Marcorè, by Silvia De Felice and Emanuela Avallone, Massimo Favia, and Alessandro Rossi, and directed by Andrea Montemaggiori, will be aired in its Rai premiere.

This episode will tell the story of those artists who risked their lives, and lost, to tackle work that today we consider art, but that perhaps then constituted a civil and political commitment. With reckless disregard for danger many artists have tackled their work, creating some of the masterpieces of art history: “If one never risked in life, Michelangelo would have painted the floor of the Sistine Chapel and not the vault,” said the great playwright Neil Simon.

The evening begins with In the Footsteps of Gerda Taro, a world premiere film by Camille Mènager, produced by Brotherfilms with the participation of France Tèlèvision. At a time when photojournalism was invented, Gerda Taro photographed the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. She created pioneering work before losing her life on the eve of her 27th birthday. From Hitler’s Germany to the battles of the Spanish Republic, to the bohemian Paris of the interwar years, her short life spanned the great history of the early part of the twentieth century. His photographs express the madness of men, the pain of war, but also the ideal of brotherhood and hope for a better world. Her name, which disappeared from collective memory, has recently re-emerged from oblivion, thanks in part to Helena Janeczek’s book The Girl with the Leica, which won the Strega Prize in 2018. In the Footsteps of Gerda Taro is an engaging documentary that follows the accidental discovery of her photos, for years attributed to her partner Robert Capa, and reconstructs her life, short though full of courageous and decisive choices.

Art Night continues with Shoot it! The Bang Bang Club’s last shot.

The Bang Bang Club was a group of four fearless young photographers who set out to show the reality of apartheid in South Africa. This is the story of unprecedented success and tragedy. It is also the story of a great friendship in the struggle for freedom in South Africa. In their early twenties, Ken Oosterbroek, Joao Silva, Kevin Carter and Greg Marinovich went into black neighborhoods to record the violence of that moment, something no other white photographer had ever dared to do. Their images went around the world and appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Time Magazine. “Their photographs definitely accelerated the changes in this country, the end of apartheid. The pictures showed the world what was happening here and increased the pressure on the regime,” says Peter Sullivan, then editor-in-chief of The Star in Johannesburg. “I would tell them every day: no picture is important enough or worth taking. But they would laugh at me. I couldn’t stop them. Every day they were living in danger. They were like wild horses,” Sullivan explains.

The four photographers were nicknamed the Bang Bang Club by a magazine and became legends. In 1991 Greg Marinovich won the Pulitzer Prize, the Oscar for photography, for his series of photos of a man being burned. In 1994 Kevin Carter won the same award for his controversial photo of a starving child and a vulture, which he shot during a trip to Sudan. Joao Silva said, “It was the photograph of Kevin’s life, a photographer’s dream. However, at the same time it destroyed him.” In the end, the friends paid a high price; only two of them survived. A documentary that is also meant to be a reflection on the role of photography between art and documentation of reality, always poised between two possibilities: should one photograph life, or live it?

On Rai5 a documentary on Gerda Taro, the recently rediscovered photojournalist companion of Robert Capa

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