Staged History
It's the iconic photo that captures the essence of the Spanish Civil War: a soldier falling to his death, arms splayed out behind him, gun still in hand, after being shot on a grassy hill.
Read the fascinating detective story in the Daily Mail here and then read George Will's take on the whole issue in the WaPo here; Will writes:
But new evidence now claims to prove once and for all that the camera does lie - and Robert Capa's famous Falling Soldier was faked.
Capa was a man of the left, and "Falling Soldier" helped to alarm the world about fascism rampant. But noble purposes do not validate misrepresentations. Richard Whelan, Capa's biographer, calls it "trivializing" to insist on knowing whether this photo actually shows a soldier mortally wounded. Whelan says that "the picture's greatness actually lies in its symbolic implications, not in its literal accuracy."I'm still debating what side to take on the whole issue... it does seem to deflate the whole image a bit... any thoughts on the subject? Leave me some comments.
Rubbish. The picture's greatness evaporates if its veracity is fictitious. To argue otherwise is to endorse high-minded duplicity -- and to trivialize Capa, who saw a surfeit of 20th-century war and neither flinched from its horrors nor retreated into an "I am a camera" detachment. As a warning about well-meaning falsifications of history, "Falling Soldier" matters because Capa probably fabricated reality to serve what he called "concerned photography."
And speaking of comments, like almost everything in the nation these days, this photographic issue has become a barbarous debate between the vast right wing conspiracy and the equally vast kooky left wing nuttery. Read the WaPo's comments to Will's point of view here and have fun with the kooks from the extreme right and the nuts from the extreme left.
7 comments:
You know, Lenny, fakery is ubiquitous, or misunderstanding perhaps. Consider - the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor caused the Spanish-American war because Hearst and his newspaper convinced Americans it was a Spanish attack, when actually the boiler blew up. Consider - the Iraq war started because the Bushies convinced Americans that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, when he didn't after all. Shall we measure the actual significance of these in terms of deaths caused, and balance them against Robert Capa's photo, which couldn't save a losing effort? I think it's possible the photo was faked (why is the dead soldier lying with his gun over his chest, when he seemed to be flinging it outward as he fell?) but I can imagine that Capa, in a foreign land, in a hurry and on the move, mistook where he was exactly. I'm not so impressed with the modern comparison picture, which seems to be uphill from the photo site, if you compare the angle of pitch of the hills on the horizon. But Capa, then a youngster really, may have overstepped himself. In any case, the question of "so what" is very pertinent here. Capa was a great war photographer, brave and on the spot. To denigrate his work 75 years later just seems so irrelevant. What is the point? George Will is an old man fighting the battles of the past, trying to justify right-wing thinking by undercutting someone who can't defend himself. Great.
- Nancy D
Fake or real... war sucks.
I've been following this debate for years. I like Capa, read books by and about him, and seen many for his works in D.C. and N.Y.C. This does tarnish his image, but I don't really look at it so romantically as a battle between left and right. He was a young, 22 year old man who probably just wanted to get a "good" photograph so he could be recognized. Thanks for the story.
Of course it matters--the truth still means something. What kind of revisionist history turns Capa in a conceptualist? He was a photojournalist who went on to found Magnum. Either the photo is real and deserves its iconic status because it encapsulates a pivotal moment in history, or it's a fraud. If fabricating reportage didn't matter, Jayson Blair would still be writing for the NYT.
The problem I've always had with this famous photograph by Capa is that is LOOKS like a staged Hollywood death pose. There are plenty of videos on Youtube that show how a gunshot victim falls to the ground after being shot in the head.
However, given the passage of time, the veracity of any image can be challenged.
The film and photographic evidence of the assassination of John F. Kennedy will be argued over by assassination fanatics (both Oswald-was-was-a-lone-gun-man theorists and Oswald-was-a-patsy conspiracy theorists) until the end of time.
I imagine the day will come when the video of Daniel Pearl being beheaded will be labeled by some expert as being a fake.
...oh, that day's almost here. The video expert will no doubt be an expert defense witness for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Forget about the right wing crazies and the left wing crazies ranting over photographs. Wait till you hear what the "expert" defense witnesses have to say about the photographic and video evidence of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's alleged crimes.
Photojournalists are supposed to be photographic journalists, right?
This is the same as fabricating a story. He fabricated a photograph and then passed it off as a real event.
I agree with Will.
You can describe a lie in a thousand ways. This is just another way; it is a photographic lie and it tarnishes an otherwise courageous photographer.
A.S.
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