Kati Horna

Even when covering the Spanish Civil War, Kati Horna’s black-and-white photographs utilized Surrealist tropes; she often used experimental techniques, creating unsettling photomontages and superimposed images that dramatized the conflict’s impact on the civilian population. Born in Budapest, where photographer Robert Capa became a close childhood friend, Horna took up photography and later moved to Berlin, where she met and was inspired by the experimental work of László Moholy-Nagy. Horna then lived in Paris for several years, where she and Capa reunited; they left Paris together to photograph the Spanish Civil War. During this time, Horna produced some of the images for which she is best known, including Breastfeeding Woman (1937), a portrait of a mother in a Madrid refugee camp. During the onset of World War II, Horna fled Europe for Mexico, where she remained for the rest of her life. She became part of an artistic circle of émigrés that included Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo—often photographing them and other Mexican cultural figures. Horna had a major 2014 retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.