look | the mexican suitcase

spanish civil war corpse in a valencia hospital by gerda taro

after some 70 years of quiet, that dusty old box of ghosts to your right woke up in mexico city and called home. it was one of three.

up until their december 2007 discovery, the 4,300 negatives within -- mundanely macabre inverts of spanish civil war scenes swiped by god knows who from photographer robert capa's paris studio around the same time that adolf hitler was marching his skinny mustache into poland -- had existed only in rumors. hunters dubbed the lost archive "the mexican suitcase."

capa, who managed to shoot five wars, lay ingrid bergman, inspire the plot of rear window and co-found magnum photos before the may 1954 afternoon he stepped on an indochine landmine and died with his camera in his hands, had a younger brother cornell. cornell capa made a name for himself shooting celebrities for life magazine, among them john f. kennedy, whose 1960 presidential campaign provided the photographer with some of his most enduring images. he later founded the international center of photography which i sometimes visit on lunch breaks when it's raining and the office is a drag.

between mounting exhibitions of robert's work (of which he was a notoriously dedicated advocate) and pursuing his own, cornell capa sweated endlessly over those missing negatives, sniffing out and unraveling every relevant anecdote. at 89 years old -- more than half a century after his brother's death and just five months before his own -- cornell capa opened the mexican suitcase and laid the rumors to rest.

composed of 126 rolls of film exposed between 1936 and 1939, the mexican suitcase archive was shot in equal parts by friends robert capa, gerda taro and david "chim" seymour, all of whom were european jews displaced and unfamilied by nazism. if you ask cornell's international center of photography, the stories contained in those miraculously pristine negatives not only "constitute an inestimable record of photographic innovation and war photography, but also of the great political struggle to determine the course of Spanish history and to turn back the expansion of global fascism." but, for my purposes here, the human story's got the real meat on it.

chim, who co-founded magnum with capa and henri cartier-bresson, put most of his photographic talent toward championing the causes of the marginalized. particularly children. he also shot a portrait of picasso with guernica that'll make your blood run backwards. in 1956, egyptians shot chim to death with machine guns while he was covering the suez armistice.

gerda taro was less than a week shy of 27 when she was crushed by a spanish republican tank, making her the first female photographer to be killed covering a war. the french communist party sprung for a plot at pere lachaise cemetery, commissioned alberto giacometti to sculpt her a gravestone and threw taro a grand funeral on her birthday.

robert capa and gerda taro met as andre friedmann and gerta pohorylle. she was his assistant and he taught her photography at the paris apartment where they lived and fell in love. they invented new names for each other -- adaptations of frank capra and greta garbo -- a romantic ploy by which they hoped to shed ethnicity and give their work some legs, in spite of the era's fascist overtones. the ploy succeeded. the pair traveled together to spanish battle lines where they made photos under death's nose as capa and taro. i don't know this for sure, but i get the impression that they met chim there. each trip won the trio increased political notoriety, and with it came friends like ernest hemingway and george orwell. sounds like it was a hell of a life they had in paris and spain.

capa proposed to taro, but she turned him down. the more overtly political bent of her anti-fascist work had earned her a rare solo assignment at the battle of brunete, 15 miles west of madrid. she went without capa, had that run-in with the tank, and came back dead.

capa was devastated. eventually he and chim sailed to new york city where they started magnum and went around with all the best people. john huston, alfred hitchcock, sophia loren... chim made iconic portraits of kirk douglas and joan collins, among others. capa traveled to the soviet union with john steinbeck, took photos on omaha beach during the battle of normandy* and slept around with movie stars. but he never got married. seems to me that the only part of his to-the-hilt, all-the-way-up life that really had room for other people -- that archetypal teenage period where everything is new and terrifying and wonderful, and after which even dodging bullets can become old hat -- got locked up in those famous suitcases.

his motto was "if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." picture post called him the best war-photographer in the world at 25. by the time he was 40, robert capa was dead.

* 3 1/2 of the 4 rolls capa shot at normandy were melted by a 15-year-old lab assistant, inspiring the title of his memoir, slightly out of focus

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+ "New Works By Old Masters," the NY Times' coverage of The Mexican Suitcase
+ The official website of The Mexican Suitcase
+ Photos by Robert Capa
+ Photos by Cornell Capa
+ Photos by Gerda Taro
+ Photos by David Chim Seymour
+ PBS' American Masters: Robert Capa