Thousands of never-before-seen images from Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David 'Chim' Seymour have cast new light on the work of the three famed photographers as revealed last week by the International Center of Photography.

The 'Mexican Suitcase' - actually three cardboard boxes of negatives - was discovered in 1995 and released to the ICP in January 2008 after years of secret negotiations with the descendants of a Mexican general who found the work (BJP, 30 January 2008).

Last week, the ICP announced that 18 months of scanning and cataloguing had come to an end, and speaking to BJP, revealed the extensive information that has been uncovered from the 4300 negatives.

'There are 46 Chim rolls, 45 Capa rolls, 32 Taro rolls and three attributed to Capa and Taro, as well as two rolls by Fred Stein,' Cynthia Young, curator at the ICP, tells BJP. Stein took portraits of Capa, Taro and their friends. The 4300 images were taken between May 1936 and March 1939, according to the Center, and most of them are from the Spanish Civil War, with the exception of two rolls from Capa's trip to Belgium in May 1939.

Unprecedented

Most of the rolls were identified through handwritten names or initials on the actual film leader, the ICP says, or through cross-referencing with vintage prints and published sources.

While the ICP continues to work on the images, with the plan to host an exhibition in late 2010, Young tells BJP that photography historians have been able to gain unprecedented insight on the three photographers' work. 'We are just at the beginning of the research, but one can see and learn so much about the eye of the photographer through these full rolls of film,' she says. 'Chim was more likely to photograph an object, an architectural detail, or a scene of daily life than Capa or Taro. Capa's commitment to visual description of a story and compassion for his subjects is evident in his coverage from the battle of Teruel at the end of 1937 and of the Spanish Civil War refugees in French interment camps in March 1939.

'In a roll of people waiting outside the morgue in Valencia in 1937, you can see Taro searching for the right crop and composition. None of this could really be understood so clearly without this film,' adds Young.

Vintage Chim

However, the biggest revelation from the 'Mexican Suitcase' is the number of previously unknown images by Chim, the Center says. 'Until this identification, the know number of vintage prints and contact books created by Chim were far fewer than those of Capa and Taro. The completion of the scanning allows us to further appreciate the career of this celebrated photographer, whose images included picture of daily life and Republican parades, as well as still lifes and portraits taken prior to the arrival of Capa and Taro in Spain.'

Also discovered were three rolls of images taken by Taro in her final days before she was killed by a tank during the Battle of Brunete in July 1937.

However, as previously reported by BJP, no negatives for Capa's Falling Soldier or any photographs relating to that story were found in the suitcase.

The majority of the 4300 negatives uncovered is previously unseen, says Young. 'A few frames on most of the rolls were printed and sent out for distribution, so the majority have not been seen in print,' she tells BJP. 'About 56 rolls correspond to (previously preserved) contact print notebooks, so we know some of the unedited negatives from these tiny prints, which really never allowed us to see them properly before,' adds Young. 'We know of other negatives through vintage prints, but the full rolls put these images in context.'

That context has sparked numerous enquiries from historians. 'There is tremendous interest in these negatives, from the photographic community, from historians of the Spanish Civil War,' says Young. 'The images are as much about these three famous photographers as images of a specific moment in history.'

The ICP's research will continue over the next year with plans to hold an exhibition at the Center's home in New York in late 2010. In the meantime, the ICP has already started to share some of its discoveries online at museum.icp.org/mexican_suitcase.

Preserving the evidence

Experts at the George Eastman House in Rochester, upstate New York, and the International Center of Photography had to handle the fragile nitrite negatives with great care to prevent the destruction of these valuable images. The cut, flat film was scanned using a Nikon film scanner, while the uncut rolled negatives were digitally photographed with a Canon digital camera using the Planar Film Duplicating Devise 2, designed by a team led by Grant Romer at the George Eastman House.

The PFD2 gently holds small sections of the film for digital capture, allowing researchers to view and preserve the images contained in the delicate nitrate-based film, a combination of Agfa, Agfa Isopan, Kodak Super X, Kodak Pancro, Kodak Panchromatic, and Gevaert film stock.

Now, the ICP plans to slow down the negatives' natural degradation by keeping them in a cold storage space with stable temperature and humidity, says Young.