Contar la historia a través de las imágenes: un acercamiento a los protagonistas de Esperando a Robert Capa de Susana Fortes

The number of literary works dedicated to the Spanish Civil War has been growing recently to the extent that those tragic three years now represent one of the most frequent topics in contemporary literature. In 2009, the Spanish writer Susana Fortes published her novel Waiting for Robert Capa (Esperando a Robert Capa), contributing thus to the long list of titles dealing with the topic of war. Without resigning to a poetic license, the author created a fictitious literary reconstruction of key moments in the lives of two famous photographers, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, whose snapshot collections are even today recognized as a valid and extensive testimony of everyday life in the period of the Spanish Civil War. This literary reconstruction of real historical events concerning both the lives of the photographers and the Civil War is based on a research into historical studies, texts, written documents and on graphic material in particular. It should be emphasized that in this novel, the photographs are very important. Throughout the story, the novelist constantly makes references to different snapshots taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and other renowned photographers of that time. These references are so detailed that the identification of the alluded pictures is made easy. It is also interesting to analyze how methods normally used in graphic arts are applied on narrative processes, creating numerous visual images that form a background to all that is viewed, experienced or recorded by the protagonists of the novel.