(De)Coding La Desbandá: a Dialogue between Modern Photojournalism and Photographic Document during Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Abstract

The Desbandá is one of the most sinister and darkest episodes of Franco's repression in Andalusia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Occurring after the fall of Malaga on 8 February 1937, the forced displacement and massacre of thousands of civilians by the Nazi air force (which tried out attacks in this episode that would later be repeated in Guernica) was widely reported in the international press at the time. There were photo reports such as the one by Gerda Taro and Robert Capa published by the French magazine Regards, as well as a chronicle with photographs taken on the ground and published in book form under the title El crimen de la carretera de Málaga a Almería (1937) by Norman Bethune. Recent discoveries such as the work of Antoni Campañà allow us to offer, for the first time, an integrating and novel view: the representation of human experience(s) based on the same collective trauma through photography as a means of mass communication in the Western context of the first third of the 20th century, and as a prologue to what was to become World War II.