The Missing Mexican Suitcase

These photos had been considered lost since 1939 when Robert Capa had to leave the negatives with Imre Weisz, his darkroom manager at the time, in order to flee Paris in 1939 to avoid capture by the Germans. According to Weisz he tried to ship the negatives to Mexico before being captured himself at Bordeaux in France and interred in Morocco until 1941. The negatives were presumed lost until they resurfaced in 2007 with Mexican filmmaker Benjamin Tarver. Tarver had inherited the film from his aunt who was close friends with General Francisco J. Aguilar Gonzalez who was the Mexican ambassador to the Vichy government in France. Gonzalez had somehow ended up with the film negatives after they left the hands of Imre Weisz.

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The cache of film negatives were held in three yellowed boxes and held around more than 4,000 photos. So why is it called the Mexican Suitcase? In the 1970's another series of Robert Capa's photographs was found in a suitcase with the Swedish government. These photos were called The Swedish Suitcase and so while there was no suitcase that held the cache of photos, the Spanish Civil War photos were called the Mexican Suitcase in homage. The photos were first displayed at the International Center of Photography (ICP) after Richard Whelen, Robert Capa's biographer, and Brian Wallace, the ICP's chief curator, worked with a film curator named Risha Ziff in Mexico to convince Benjamin Tarver to release the photos to the archives of the ICP.

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