Today's Google Doodle honors Gerda Taro, a photographer and journalist who played a major role in shaping wartime coverage.
Taro was born in Germany in 1910, but left for Paris in the early 1930s, when Hitler became Germany's chancellor. Once there, the International Center of Photography reports, she met and fell in love with the photojournalist Robert Capa. The two traveled and worked together, covering the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War for Paris newspapers. Although Taro's work was remarkable, credit was often mistakenly given to Capa.
During one solo excursion to the front lines of the war in 1937, Taro was tragically killed by a tank while treating from the battlefield. When speaking to the BBC, photographer Kate Brooks attributed Taro's lack of recognition until recently to a few factors: Much of Taro's family died during the Holocaust and many of her photographs remained lost, forgotten in the possession of a Mexican ambassador, until the 1990s.
According to Google's Doodle Blog, "the little red fox", as Taro was called, "is considered to be the first female journalist in the world to cover the front lines of conflict." She was followed by many more well-recognized photographers and reporters over the next couple of decades, including Margaret Bourke-White and Martha Gellhorn.
Head to the search engine's homepage today and you'll see Taro, holding her camera and smiling, in the center of a black-and-white film strip. She would have turned 108 today.