Intense, brief, exceptional. Three words to describe the only female photojournalism published in the Barcelona press between 1900 and 1939. In a field dominated by men, the first photo credited to a woman did not appear until the start of the Spanish Civil War.

Behind the credits Informaciones Sagi, Foto Sagi or, simply, Sagi hid the rebellious spirit of Anna Maria Martínez Sagi. Born into a middle-class family, she received a good education. Her multi-faceted personality made her a popular figure in the Republican years. As a poet, she got her literary start in 1929 with her book Caminos. Three years later, she published Inquietudes.

That same year, in 1932, her family life changed dramatically: her father died, one of her sisters got married, and her brother left for Uruguay. It was then that she decided to strike out on her own.
However, it was not her literary accomplishments that made her a public figure, but her involvement in sport, in terms of both promoting it, through the Club Femení d’Esports [Women’s Sport Club], of which she was a founder and member from 1930 to 1935, and as an athlete. She played tennis, swam, skied and rowed, but her greatest achievements were in athletics; in 1931, she won the gold medal in the javelin throw in the National Athletic Championship. In 1934, she became the first woman to sit on the board of FC Barcelona; she lasted a year, after which she stepped down over differences.

The work that allowed her to support herself was journalism. She began writing for various publications in 1931. She was a regular contributor to La Rambla; she wrote for the Madrid weekly Crónica, which also reported on her career in sport; and, in 1932, she became coordinator of the ‘Página de Mujeres’ [Women’s Page] section of La Noche.

By the time of the 1936 coup, she was an experienced journalist and a woman who represented and publicly espoused republican and feminist values. It is no surprise that she continued to pursue her career from a new perspective, namely, that of a war correspondent. As such, her adventures were exceptional; she was an all-terrain journalist in that, in addition to filing written reports, she also became a photojournalist.

In early August 1936, La Noche announced the correspondents sent to the front, including ‘Ana María Martínez Sagi, the only woman journalist who has gone to Aragonese lands’. She published accounts and photographs in that newspaper and in El Día Gráfico, the company’s morning paper, throughout August. On 9 August, she also made her debut as a photojournalist in La Vanguardia.

Her regular contributions to La Noche and El Día Gráfico came to a halt in early September, when she was wounded at the front by the impact of a grenade. Photos credited to her have been found dating from September of that month in La Rambla and La Vanguardia.
‘The remarkable writer and war correspondent’ made headlines on 13 October, when the Madrid newspaper El Sol reported that she had been involved in a car accident on the Aragonese front. From that point on, her career as a correspondent seems to have been cut short, although one document proves that she was still active in January 1937: her registration for the Agrupació Professional de Periodistes [Professional Journalists Association], where she is listed as a contributor to La Noche and La Rambla, although no by-lines or photo credits have been found.

During the war, she moved to Caspe, where she continued her work as a journalist for the newspaper Nuevo Aragón, mouthpiece of the Aragonese Regional Council created by the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo [National Workers Confederation or CNT, an anarcho-syndicalist union]. On 29 January 1939, she crossed the French border: it was the start of decades of exile, spent mostly in the United States, where she taught at the University of Illinois. She returned to Catalonia in the late 1960s, where she lived in obscurity until her death in 2000.