End Date :
301 Philosophy Hall
On Saturday, April 23, Columbia University and the International Center of Photography will present a day-long symposium titled “China and Spain, 1936-39: Robert Capa and the Global Popular Front.” Bringing together eleven scholars from the U.S. and China, the interconnections between the Spanish Civil War and the concurrent Chinese war of resistance against invading Japanese forces will be explored.
A focal point of the symposium will be the photographs of Robert Capa, who won early fame for his dramatic battlefield images in Spain in 1936-37. It is less well known that Capa spent much of 1938 covering the fighting in central China, during a period that witnessed surprising cooperation between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Guomindang (Nationalist) forces and their Communist rivals. Based in Wuhan, which had become the Nationalist capital after the Japanese conquest of Nanjing in December 1937, Capa was part of an extensive international contingent of writers, reporters, photojournalists, and filmmakers that included W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Joris Ivens, and Agnes Smedley.
