Photography: Fred Stein and Gerda Taro

Out of curiosity - and since now I am proud owner of a Museum card - I went to a local Jewish Museum. The main reason was to see the photo exhibition of an artist whose work intrigued me, but actually the museum itself was so interesting that I almost forgot why was I there. I have almost exited, when I remembered there is also a temporary exhibition tribute to this guy. Fred Stein was German photographer who was haunted out of Germany and France by Nazis and eventually found a new start in US where he became quite well known. Just reading the details of his biography sounds like a movie - together his wife, he escaped Germany in a nick of time (the son of the factory owner warned him that Gestapo was asking questions about him), their little apartment in Paris was a haven for artists who slept, ate and held long discussions there and when the couple eventually escaped occupied France, they were hiding in the bathrooms of trains. Still, they started a new life in New York where he continued his photographer work and eventually changed his focus from a street photography to portraits. I find his work enormously interesting and wonder can street photography work today, in atmosphere of fear and suspicion, when people would not welcome a stranger taking photos of them? 

Somewhere in the collection, there was a interesting old, black & white photograph of a happy couple smiling together in some Paris bar. Apparently the only photo of them together. That was Gerda Taro and her love, Robert Capa. Both war photographers and very famous in their time, specially for their work in 1930s Spanish Civil War - in fact, Taro died in action, while shooting army retreat. In this photo exhibition they were quite a few pictures of smiling Taro, who for a while lived with Stein and his wife in their Paris apartment - she is immortalised on a series of black and white photos as a vibrant, young woman (and quite a beauty) living in unusual and dangerous times. That one particular picture of a smiling, happy couple somehow intrigued me and made me curious to do some more research about her. The story could make a very good movie or a novel.