A "lost" work re-discovered

A Manful Fight: Ernest Hemingway (third from left), New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews (second from left) and two Republican soldiers smoke in Teruel, Spain, in 1937, in this photograph by Robert Capa

"In 1939, famed war photographer Robert Capa left a suitcase of film negatives in the care of his darkroom manager, Csiki Weiss. Capa, who fled Paris for New York in advance of the German invasion, would never again see the suitcase, which held dozens of rolls of undeveloped film that he and his colleagues, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, shot during the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, the cache stayed hidden for decades and was thought lost to the world. It wasn’t until 2007 that the so-called Mexican Suitcase arrived at the International Center of Photography, the New York museum founded by Capa’s brother, Cornell Capa.

“The Mexican Suitcase,” an exhibition of contact sheets printed from the recovered negatives, is on display at the ICP through January 9. Less an exhibition of photojournalism and more an examination of process, the show provides an exhilarating study of the three photographers whose shots of Republican life in 1930s Spain helped launch the art of modern war photography."

Continue to read this fascinating piece [including a photograph of Ernest Hemingway, above] - and an insight into things past - from The Forward here.