Even if he acted from the best of motives, what Robert Capa did now seems indefensible
Very sadly, then, it's a fake. Hokey. A gammon, a sham, a queer, a snide. Seventy-three years later, this is still very bad news indeed.
A few weeks ago, we reported on an academic study which revived doubts, which have niggled for more than half a century, over the authenticity of "The Falling Soldier", Robert Capa's famous Spanish Civil War photograph of a Republican militiaman at the moment of death. A Spanish newspaper has now further proved, with pictures, far beyond reasonable doubt, that the fledgling, Hungarian-born star, who went on to cofound the revered Magnum agency, got his big photographic break through trickery: stuck too far from the action, he persuaded bored soldiers in a distant village to act out their deaths to make a point. No one wanted it to be a fake. No one had reason to lie. The evidence is sadly compelling.
And my first thought, my thought any time I've seen this picture, was: does it matter? It is still an astonishing image. It captures, or as we now know purported to capture, the very moment of death; legs and torso in a shocking tumble of forced imbalance, seemingly impossible in life, the face neither shocked nor pained, but wholly unknowing; and life, fields and vistas and skies, going on, but suddenly without him. It made much of the world pay more attention to Franco's war and the rising German fascist movement funding it; volunteers arrived from around the world in a nascent spirit of internationalism. Subsequently, it made generations of younger viewers, myself included, think apparently big thoughts about war and death. Why should it matter that it was faked, if it got a point across, and made people think?
Similar confusion struck me with the row over Robert Doisneau's posed tableau of the opposite subject, love. "The Kiss", an apparently spontaneous once-in-a-lifetime snatched embrace between young lovers by a fountain in Paris in 1950, spoke down the decades of passion, freedom, youth and more innocent times: did it matter, at all, as we eventually found out, that it was all so wilfully, artfully, staged?
Take another image: sudden, visceral, shocking, reproduced almost every time Vietnam's mentioned. Please forgive me for stumbling awkwardly all round the houses just to avoid the word "iconic". Young Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing down the road naked after a napalm attack: the picture that helped turn the tide of opinion against that war. Would the emotions and opinions engendered be negated, retrospectively, if we suddenly found there had been fakery? There wasn't, but the question remains I think valid.
Yes. The conclusion has to be that it does matter, it all matters. It matters that Capa cheated; it would matter if the napalm shot had been tricksy. Because we were not being sold "art", the representation of an idea to let us think about truths: we were being sold truths. That's why there are art galleries, but also museums, why there are novels, but also newspapers...
Read entire article at Observer (UK)
A few weeks ago, we reported on an academic study which revived doubts, which have niggled for more than half a century, over the authenticity of "The Falling Soldier", Robert Capa's famous Spanish Civil War photograph of a Republican militiaman at the moment of death. A Spanish newspaper has now further proved, with pictures, far beyond reasonable doubt, that the fledgling, Hungarian-born star, who went on to cofound the revered Magnum agency, got his big photographic break through trickery: stuck too far from the action, he persuaded bored soldiers in a distant village to act out their deaths to make a point. No one wanted it to be a fake. No one had reason to lie. The evidence is sadly compelling.
And my first thought, my thought any time I've seen this picture, was: does it matter? It is still an astonishing image. It captures, or as we now know purported to capture, the very moment of death; legs and torso in a shocking tumble of forced imbalance, seemingly impossible in life, the face neither shocked nor pained, but wholly unknowing; and life, fields and vistas and skies, going on, but suddenly without him. It made much of the world pay more attention to Franco's war and the rising German fascist movement funding it; volunteers arrived from around the world in a nascent spirit of internationalism. Subsequently, it made generations of younger viewers, myself included, think apparently big thoughts about war and death. Why should it matter that it was faked, if it got a point across, and made people think?
Similar confusion struck me with the row over Robert Doisneau's posed tableau of the opposite subject, love. "The Kiss", an apparently spontaneous once-in-a-lifetime snatched embrace between young lovers by a fountain in Paris in 1950, spoke down the decades of passion, freedom, youth and more innocent times: did it matter, at all, as we eventually found out, that it was all so wilfully, artfully, staged?
Take another image: sudden, visceral, shocking, reproduced almost every time Vietnam's mentioned. Please forgive me for stumbling awkwardly all round the houses just to avoid the word "iconic". Young Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing down the road naked after a napalm attack: the picture that helped turn the tide of opinion against that war. Would the emotions and opinions engendered be negated, retrospectively, if we suddenly found there had been fakery? There wasn't, but the question remains I think valid.
Yes. The conclusion has to be that it does matter, it all matters. It matters that Capa cheated; it would matter if the napalm shot had been tricksy. Because we were not being sold "art", the representation of an idea to let us think about truths: we were being sold truths. That's why there are art galleries, but also museums, why there are novels, but also newspapers...