Reimagining the Spanish Civil War | MÓN
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MÓN · A Visual Journalism Investigation
Reimagining
the Spanish
Civil War
Work in progress
The Spanish Civil War lasted three years, killed hundreds of thousands, and drew in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and volunteers from fifty countries. The United States declared neutrality and held it while nearly three thousand Americans crossed the Atlantic to fight anyway, joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the Republican side. It was the first modern air war against civilians, the proving ground for the tactics that would define World War II, and the last moment in which an armed left-wing resistance held a European capital against fascism. Spain has been living with its consequences ever since.

This project maps the places where that war happened and where its traces remain. At every location, two moments coexist: what the cameras recorded between 1936 and 1939, and what remains now, recovered through reenactments, interviews, and the author's own return to the same ground.

The photographs ask a question that has no clean answer: what does it mean to reconstruct a moment that was already, at the time, a reconstruction? Gerda Taro staged her prisoners. Endre Ernő Friedmann arrived after the crossing. Both he and Taro published under the name Robert Capa. The reenactors dress in the uniforms of men who are gone. The question of what makes an image true runs through every frame in this archive.

This is not a finished record. It is a project in progress, built around the war's beginning in July 1936.

Songs of the War
Si me quieres escribir · Frente de Gandesa · c. 1937 · Republican
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El novio de la muerte · Fidel Prado / Juan Costa · 1921 · Nationalist
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