On July 27th, 1937, while photographing the Battle of Brunete Gerda Taro became the first female war photographer to the in action. After escaping from the Nazis Gerta Pohorylle had met a man called Andre Friedmann in Paris, she adopted Friedmann's profession of photographer and the two travelled to Spain together to take part in the Spanish Civil War.<BR>In Spain they took on new identities. Gerta became Gerda Taro while Friedmann became Robert Capa (and would become the greatest war photographer of the twentieth-century). For the rest of her short life Gerda Taro devoted herself to Republican Spain. She travelled widely, photographing troops as they drilled and patrolled; taking remarkable images of refugees, air raids and battles.<BR>Francois Maspero captures the extraordinary figures Taro knew and lived with (from Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelihorn to Louis Aragon), and portrays the assertion of liberty - political, sexual and personal - that was central to her life. Once Capa introduced her to photography, Gerda Taro used photojournalism to serve her dream of winning freedom for all people.<BR>Taro's life was more than a reflection of its time. With her libertarian beliefs and the moral (as well as physical) courage of her life, her death made her a martyr of the anti-fascist movement and she has now been rediscovered in the twenty-first century as a feminist icon, a pioneer for all women, as well as one of the great war photographers.