OUR AUNT ANITA

exhibition finally opened a family member of the unknown woman attended while visiting Barcelona from France.

“We got goosebumps,” François Gomez Garbin revealed, on seeing his aunt Anita in the photo.

And by chance Monne, who happened to be there at that moment, was told that the woman’s name was Ana Garbín Alonso.

And finally her story was known.

Born in Almería in 1915, Alonso was 21 years old when Campaña took her photograph, which was then distributed throughout Europe on the postcard album, The Fight in Barcelona. When the war ended with a win by Fran- co's fascist army, Alonso was forced to cross the Spanish border and settle in Beziers, France. She became a dressmaker and had a son, Pepito, yet incredibly never once returned to Spain. Despite this, Spanish culture pervaded the walls of her home, its music, food and humour. And now, this month, her story is being told in an extraordinary exhibition in Montpellier entitled; Hidden icons. The Unknown Images of the Spanish War. Alonso died in 1977, but the exhibition remembers her fighting spirit and includes a selection of many other of Campaña's works.