The Story Behind the Images

I grew up knowing more about Teruel and the Spanish Civil War than most of the adults who actually lived through those times. The war seemed to be a beacon for right-thinking people — the young and rebellious, the idealists of all stripes and creeds, my father included, flocked to the war as volunteers and fundraisers. The enemy was clear, the expected outcome dire. Romantic to be sure — but as the world turned colder and wars became an unholy brutality, it seemed that the bravery and idealism of the Republican forces continued, even now, to hold their place of noble note.

And sometimes, in the literature of the times, in Hemingway and Malraux, in Saint-Exupéry and Romain Gary, the best of what my father’s generation grew to understand and eventually to carry forward was revealed, revered and made mine. That it has been tarnished and misused, ignored when most needed is my doing and none of their own. No pasarán, he told me once. They shall not pass. It means that you can overcome your own worst fears, he said, and make better decisions for yourself. It has taken the better part of my life but here I am and I say, no pasarán, m—-f—er, I’m here and it is my time.

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The Images Behind the Story

This image above is the result of a failed attempt, one of many, to create a background for my new photo site. I wanted something film-like in the background so I googled “negatives” and came up with several sites that featured negative strips of 35mm film.

One of the sites featured a story about Robert Capa, the famed still photographer whose pictures of combat set a standard for realism that has rarely been matched. Capa’s photos of the Spanish Civil War are the stuff of legend for their graphic humanism in the midst of slaughter. The other item was series of explorations of open-pit mining, images of destruction in the name of a different kind of progress.

I started by cutting and pasting the images in a random way in order to fill in the required [web] space. I hated it. Didn’t work at all. But the more I looked at the image I had accidentally created, the more it spoke to me of something buried, a moment long lost, a connection with my father who died ten years ago the other day. It became memory, something of value for itself.

Photo Credit

“No Pasarán” Photo Collage by Michael Lebowitz, LongRun Photography