Dezső Révai photograph

This photograph showing children displaced or orphaned by the war in an education centre in Benicassim was taken by Dezső Révai. Aling with Robert Capa (originally Endre Friedmann), and Kati Horna (originally Kati Deutsch), Révai was one of the three Hungarians among the photographers and filmmakers from all over the world who went to Spain to capture images of the fighting. All three were frequent visitors to left-wing circles in Hungary and later elsewhere in Europe, and their photographs were published mainly in left-wing newspapers. Capa and Horna met in the 1920s, and it was during the Spanish Civil War that they became professional photographers. 

Dezső Révai (1903-1996) joined the International Brigades as a volunteer, worked in their propaganda department, and published several series of photographs in the Brigades’ own publications. His most famous series captured the everyday life of inhabitants of Madrid using the subway as a shelter, but he also photographed the educational institutions set up by the Republic. After the Civil War, he was sent to a French internment camp, then returned to Hungary, first as head of a news agency, then as director of the Hungarian film industry in the 1950s. 

Kati Horna (1912–2000) spent 18 months in Spain from 1937 at the invitation of the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). Her photographs focusing mainly on the everyday effects of the war, such as the situation of the civilian population, especially women and children, prisons, and hospitals rather than the war itself. Her work, which was was strongly influenced by surrealism, was characterized by the use of photomontage and juxtaposition to create images of disturbing effect. After the Civil War, Horna lived and worked in Mexico. Her archive of more than 500 photographs taken in Spain was discovered in the CNT archives in Amsterdam only in 2019, adding to the 250 photographs already known. 

Endre Friedman (1913-1954) went to Spain on assignment from the French communist news magazine Regards. He worked with German war photographer Gerda Taro, and together they coined the name “Robert Capa”. Their photographs captured the brutality of the fighting and became iconic images of the Spanish Civil War. To this day, Capa is known as “the world’s greatest war photographer”. Along with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Capa’s photograph The Fallen Soldier, became one of the most important symbols of the Civil War, known to almost everyone. After 1938, he photographed many other wars around the world and died in 1954 while covering the First Indochina War.