They remained unaccounted for eight decades after being saved in 47 wooden boxes, perhaps from rifles, by the CNT-FAI during the bombing of Barcelona in 1939. They passed through Paris, stayed in England during World War II and arrived in 1947 in their destination, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which already had documents from Marx or Bakunin and one of whose founders was an anarcho-syndicalist. There the 47 boxes remained closed until Franco's death. In the eighties they were opened, but the thousands of images they contained, coming from the Photographic Archive of the FAI Propaganda Offices, were not given importance. Other documents from the Catalan anarchists were preferred.
Only in 2016 Almudena Rubio, a researcher at the Dutch center, sees its value and discovers, thanks to books by anarchists like Emma Goldman or Augustin Souchy, whom they accompanied around the country, that there are hundreds of images by two great photographers, the Hungarian Kati Horna and Margaret Michaelis, born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1902. Who put their cameras at the service of the social revolution of the Catalan, Aragonese and Valencian rearguard in the Civil War. Now a hundred of these photos are exhibited until July 24 at the Calcografía Nacional in Madrid in an exhibition co-produced by PhotoEspaña and the Diputación de Huesca, The boxes of Amsterdam: Kati Horna and Margaret Michaelis in the Civil War, which will then be seen , increased to 220 photographs, at La Virreina Center de la Imatge in Barcelona.
Photographs that show neighborhood children wearing militia hats, churches transformed into furniture stores with mattresses stacked on the altar, a burlesque doll that imitates Franco in Barcelona's Plaza Catalunya, or workers in collectivized vineyards. There are also images from the front, but Almudena Rubio, curator of the exhibition, points out that "it is a rearguard archive and the photos tell that not-so-known story of the Civil War, that of the social revolution promoted by the anarchists and that allows us to see to the protagonists, the working class, motivated and happy: for the first time they take control of their lives”.
He confesses that he was surprised to discover that “the main cameras of the anarchists had been two foreign and Jewish women, having photographers like Antoni Campañà in Barcelona”. But he adds that they were independent women "committed to antifascism and anarcho-syndicalism." Michaelis, who had had a photographic studio in the Catalan capital since 1933, will portray her in her moments of splendor in 1936. Horna will have to face Franco's smear campaign against anti-fascism in 1937. After going to Valencia, she would end up married to the Andalusian anarchist artist José Horna and in 1938 they would go into exile in Mexico.
