Taro frequently focused on civilian life: children playing in the rubble of bombed-out buildings, a man getting a haircut, an orphan eating soup. One of her most striking pictures--moving and terrible--was shot in February 1937 and is called "Child refugee from Málaga in Almería, Spain." We see a plump, sleeping toddler surrounded by a striped mattress and a mound of white blankets. The child, whose sex cannot be gleaned from the photograph, wears Mary Janes and what looks like a pajama top over a sweater. White pants are pulled down below the child's knees; the genitals are exposed but blurry: this is an image of unbearable vulnerability. But the shock of this picture, or what Roland Barthes would have called its punctum--"that accident," Barthes wrote, "which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)"--are the two perfect, round scabs that adorn the child's chubby knees.

I doubt, however, that much of an argument about a "woman's view" can be deduced from photos such as this (though only Taro photographed a militiawoman wearing high heels); Capa, too, often focused on life behind the lines. This was less an aesthetic or emotional choice than a political one. Taro and Capa wanted the world to see not just what was being destroyed in Spain but also what was being created. They were not only antifascist; they were pro-Republican. (It is this kind of allegiance that, alas, contemporary war photographers often cannot entertain: which side should they have supported in, say, the Liberian civil war?)

Capa and Taro realized, immediately and intuitively, that the Spanish Civil War was a modern war not just in the way it was being reported, photographed and filmed but in the way it was being waged. Bombing campaigns designed to cause massive civilian deaths, especially by Hitler's Condor Legion, were a key tool of the fascists; though it may be hard for us to imagine now, the destruction of civilian centers like Valencia, Madrid and Guernica was truly shocking at the time. (It is true that 1914 had ushered in what Eric Hobsbawm called "the age of massacre"; but it is also true, as Hobsbawm and others have written, that the majority of casualties in World War I were uniformed soldiers.) Documenting civilians as builders, fighters and victims was central to Capa and Taro's project. It was a project avowedly international in intent, geared above all to build interventionist support--whether based on solidarity, anger, fear or shame--in Britain, France and America. One of the Spanish posters in the ICP's vibrant accompanying exhibit called "Other Weapons" captures this well. It shows a photomontage of a dead child with bomber planes flying overhead; its prescient headline simultaneously pleads and threatens: "What Europe Tolerates or Protects/What Your Children Can Expect."

Taro's photos, too, were meant to plead, threaten and shock--and they are sometimes gorier and more graphic than Capa's. Her up-close series of air-raid victims in a morgue, shot in Valencia in 1937, shows blackened blood streaming from just-stilled faces onto slabs, sheets and dirty tiled floors. Taro prided herself, also, on photographing soldiers--reading, resting, strategizing, fighting--at the front; the partisan who would become Capa's "Falling Soldier" appears in one of her pictures too. And she photographed the training of the new Popular Army, a unified, Communist-dominated force designed to replace the panoply of anarchist-syndicalist militias. (Like most photos of uniformed armies standing in straight rows, hers are not particularly interesting.)

Those improvised militias were a stirring phenomenon, and Capa's famous, immensely moving portraits of them in the early days of the war are suffused with something we can only call love. Still, George Orwell's opposition to the Popular Army in Homage to Catalonia was, I think, simply wrong, though the book is now regarded as gospel by much of the American left. The militias were a manifestation of spontaneous, revolutionary democracy in action. They were also untrained, underarmed and undisciplined: hardly a match for the forces of Franco, Mussolini and, especially, Hitler. In fact, as the Spanish historian Juan Fusi Aizpùrua wrote in Heart of Spain, a book of Capa's photographs from the war, the improvised militias were "disastrous" from a military standpoint. Orwell erred, too, in opposing a popular front that included members of what he called "the capitalist class": for it was just such a front that eventually defeated fascism. (Capa was an ardent popular frontist, going back to his days in Paris.) And then there is Orwell's belief--tragically utopian, in retrospect--that a more radical revolution in Spain might have inspired an uprising, or at least a general strike, by the international proletariat. This was also Lenin's hope, in 1917, for Russia: such dreams die hard.

Like Taro, Capa was killed while documenting war: he died in 1954, at age 40, when he stepped on a land mine in Vietnam. His body of work is, of course, far more extensive than Taro's, and the current exhibit makes no pretense of being comprehensive. "This Is War!"--the title comes from a 1938 Picture Post headline heralding Capa's photos--concentrates on the hopeful beginnings of the war in Spain in 1936 and its devastating end in 1938-39; on China in 1938, churning with revolutionary activity as it fought the Japanese invasion; on D-Day; and on Leipzig in the spring of 1945, as the German army collapsed. (Leipzig had been Taro's home, and its liberation held a special significance for Capa.) But even this admittedly narrow focus is, perhaps, narrower than need be. None of Capa's photos from Vietnam, nor from Israel's 1948 War of Independence--which his biographer Alex Kershaw called "Capa's most personal war"--are included. And the exhibit gives the misleading impression that Capa defined "war" primarily in terms of battles, troops, ammunition, bombs, rubble, wounds and death. Many of Capa's most evocative photographs, which document the beauty, grief and everyday heroism of civilian life during wartime, are missing.

Still, the ICP show is full of memorable pictures: the delivery of fat stacks of newspapers to Loyalist soldiers on the Aragon front in 1938; crowds of Chinese men, dressed in Western-style suits and ties, excitedly watching an air battle in Hankou in 1938; bedraggled, pitiful Spanish refugees trudging to the French border as the Republic fell in 1939 (one small, dark-haired girl looking eerily like a young Anne Frank); an American GI kicking a Nazi soldier in Leipzig in 1945, an image that was censored at the time. And then there's the portrait of a serious, wan young man standing before a pen-and-ink portrait of Karl Marx and a banner of Chinese calligraphy. He turns out to be Zhou En-lai at the Communist Party headquarters in Hankou.

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