How to Narrate a War: Kati Horna’s Photography During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)—Moving Across the Real and the Symbolic

Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912–2000) is one of the few women photographers known that worked in Spain during the Civil War (1936–1939). She ran through borders, as she lived, studied, and worked in Hungary, Germany, France, Spain, and Mexico. At the same time her work crossed these geographical borders, she also crossed the metaphorical, stylistic, and technical limits imposed by her time. She moved from shooting ordinary people in the streets in Paris or Barcelona to portraying refugees in child care and maternity institutions in Almeria, and militiamen on the war front in Teruel; from recreating symbolic pictures about death and mourning to depicting design and architecture in her new life in Mexico. This research focuses on the different types, themes, formats, and techniques of Horna’s work that appeared in pamphlets, posters, photo albums, journals, and magazines in order to gain foreign support for the anarchist social revolution, as she performed as an activist professional during the Spanish war. However, the last aim is to give a broader but thorough view of Horna’s photographs in perspective with her previous performance before arriving in Spain and with her most experimental work in her Mexican exile.