1. Gerda Taro born 1 August 1910
German Jewish photographer Gerda Taro (1910-1937) has both the distinction of being one of the first women war photographers, and the first to die in the line of work in July 1937, while covering the Brunete offensive of the Spanish Civil War.
In 1933, after fleeing the Nazi Party, she met photographer Robert Capa and the two would become the daring and tragic war photographic duo known as ‘Capa and Taro’. Her candid, intimate photographs of the war, especially coverage of hospitals and morgues after the bombing of Valencia, are clear predecessors of the raw and unfiltered war journalism of today.
2. Ylla born 16 August 1911
Hungarian photographer Camilla Koffler aka Ylla (1911- 1955) was a pioneer of animal photography. After studying sculpture in Belgrade, Ylla moved to Paris and, in 1932, opened a studio to photograph pets, under the name ‘Studio Ylla Photographies d’Animaux’ .At the outbreak of the Second World War, she emigrated to America. She became well known for her animal photography publications but sadly died at the age of 43 in India, after falling from a jeep while photographing an oxen race.
3. Tina Modotti born 16th August 1896
Italian born American photographer Tina Modotti (1896-1942) presents a distinctive photographic vision of 1920s Mexico. As a Hollywood actress-turned Comintern agent, she used photography as an artistic and political tool.
Tina emigrated to Mexico with her partner, photographer Edward Weston, and ran a studio in Mexico City from 1923 to 1931, moving within avant-garde circles, befriending Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and key revolutionary figures. Her political engagement and the eye for composition she harnessed to express it are uniquely her own.
4. Edith Tudor Hart born 28th August 1908
Austrian born British Communist Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky) (1908-1973) documented the unstable conditions of the Viennese and British working class.
She studied photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau and began photographing workers’ demonstrations in the 1930s. In 1933 she fled to Britain to avoid political persecution and struggled to make a meagre living photographing for national publications.
Her secret, which was only revealed to her family nearly twenty years after her death, was that Edith had also been recruited as an unpaid spy for the Soviet Union.
5. Helen Levitt born 31st August 1913
Born in Brooklyn in 1913 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Helen Levitt (1813-2009) left high school in her final year to learn darkroom techniques with a commercial photographer in the Bronx. Later working as a part-time art teacher in Spanish Harlem in 1936, Helen started documenting children at play in Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Harlem and the Bronx, in candid, quirky and joyous compositions, full of humour and spontaneity. She was offered her first exhibition, ‘Photographs of Children’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1943 and throughout the 50s, she worked whilst also directing and editing 16 mm documentary films.
Helen was a gifted visual storyteller, and she captured the relationships, energy and theatre of the streets of New York for over seventy years.
