ALFREDO TRIFF

The myth behind the fact: Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier @mbourbaki

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Robert Capa’s photo “Fallen Soldier ” was published in the July 12, 1937, issue of Life magazine. It had actually appeared on two French publications, Vu and Regards, in 1936.* Anyone who has browsed through a textbook on the Spanish Civil War or a collection of outstanding twentieth-century photos may have seen the picture above. Then, I found this interesting piece by Larry Rohter in the New York Times.

On a recent foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tion, Manuel Sus­per­regui, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­dad del País Vas­co, con­clud­ed that Robert Capa’s Falling Sol­dier pho­to­graph is a fab­ri­cat­ed mon­tage. This is not the first attempt to ques­tion the famous image’s reli­a­bil­i­ty in a con­tro­ver­sy span­ning three decades.  Capa does­n’t have many detrac­tors. He is even admired by some of his crit­ics, who present the mat­ter as ‑less than knav­ery- a clever, unfor­tu­nate prank of a young reporter, a but­ter­fly-effect that ends up smear­ing the myth of the ide­al­is­tic, adven­tur­ous, wom­an­iz­er, almost hero­ic, Wan­der­ing Jew. In fact, not every­one agrees with Sus­per­regui’s analy­sis: Read this exten­sive post by José Manuel Ser­ra­no. 
Esparza (a Span­ish mem­ber of the Leica His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca). 1 In 1975, O.D. Gal­lagher, a South African-born jour­nal­ist who had cov­ered the Span­ish Civ­il War for the Lon­don Dai­ly Express, told Phillip Knight­ley ‑author of “The First Casu­al­ty: The War Cor­re­spon­dent as Hero, Pro­pa­gan­dist, and Myth Mak­er” (1975)- that Capa had manip­u­lat­ed the pho­to.  In recent years, the con­tro­ver­sy over the authen­tic­i­ty of the image has tak­en a some­what dra­mat­ic turn. 2The 2003 doc­u­men­tary In Love and War, direct­ed by Anne Make­peace, defends the pho­to’s authen­tic­i­ty. A PBS site repro­duces Richard Whee­lan’s arti­cle “Prov­ing that Robert Capa’s “Falling Sol­dier” is gen­uine: A Detec­tive Sto­ry.“Then, in 2007, the Span­ish doc­u­men­tary La som­bra del ice­berg,3 direct­ed by Hugo Doménech and Raúl M. Rieben­bahuer, con­clud­ed not only that Capa’s shot was staged but also that the fall­en sol­dier was not the mili­tia­man Fed­eri­co Bor­rell Gar­cía but some­one else.

Who is right?As with cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, you see what you want to see.  To this day, despite the alleged proof that the pho­to was staged, some remain unmoved.  Accord­ing to Rohther, “even as experts at the Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Man­hat­tan, where Capa’s archive is stored, said they found some aspects of Mr. Sus­per­regui’s inves­ti­ga­tion intrigu­ing or even con­vinc­ing… they con­tin­ue to believe that the image seen in Falling Sol­dier is gen­uine, and cau­tion against jump­ing to con­clu­sions.” Why should it be any dif­fer­ent?  Peo­ple have no prob­lem believ­ing that the earth is 5,000 years old, dinosaurs did not exist, or mir­a­cles selec­tive­ly hap­pened in the Mid­dle East dur­ing the 1st Cen­tu­ry AD.

To get it off my chest: I sense a bit of geopo­lit­i­cal rival­ry (but it’s more com­pli­cat­ed than that).

Sur­pris­ing­ly, after vis­it­ing Sus­per­regui’s exhi­bi­tion, the Span­ish Min­is­ter of Cul­ture Ánge­les González-Sinde asserts: Art is always manip­u­la­tion, from the moment you point a cam­era in one direc­tion and not anoth­er.
If art is ‑always- a manip­u­la­tion, what’s all the fuss about?

Alex Ker­shaw’s biog­ra­phy of Robert Capa enti­tled Blood and Cham­pagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa for The New Repub­lic. Thom­son pro­duces a “so-what?” rebut­tal. What is the big deal if Capa was cheat­ing? “Are we just very sen­ti­men­tal about the kind of ‘truth’ that pho­tog­ra­phy alleged­ly leads to?” To but­tress his argu­ment he fol­lows a sort of aes­thet­ic thread. What if Capa was a painter paint­ing “Falling Sol­dier”?

A painter at the front lines could eas­i­ly and legit­i­mate­ly paint a pic­ture of a falling sol­dier. No one would object, if the paint­ing was as strong as Capa’s pho­to­graph. Nobody would cry deceit. Paint­ing, after all, implies mea­sured deci­sions regard­ing sub­ject, size, com­po­si­tion, col­or­ing, and so on.  Why must pho­tog­ra­phy be dif­fer­ent? Is it so reliant on absolute fideli­ty to the moment?

One could argue that Capa is not paint­ing but shoot­ing a pic­ture. A cam­er­a’s duty is to take a “quick shot” and so on. The real issue here is the blow to epis­te­mo­log­i­cal objec­tiv­i­ty that is con­comi­tant with pho­to­graph­ic jour­nal­ism at a cru­cial moment, that is to say, the most impor­tant civ­il war of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. Let’s recall that ‑before Pho­to­shop- the cam­era is the fact-pro­duc­ing instru­ment par excel­lence. “Falling Sol­dier” is right in the mid­dle of the link between epis­te­mol­o­gy and the social order, between “what is” and “what should be.”

“What is”
 
Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy seems more like a mish­mash of ten­den­cies, reflect­ing our diverse inter­ests more than some neu­tral non-sub­jec­tive domain of human endeav­or. Just to show the hand of manip­u­la­tion in ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy, take a look at Pic­to­ri­al­ism. As ear­ly as 1880, pho­tog­ra­phers began col­or­ing their pho­tos to achieve an Impres­sion­ist-like effect, which was, even then, a con­tro­ver­sial medi­um manip­u­la­tion.4
 

In Pond-Moon­light, bove, Ste­ichen cre­at­ed the impres­sion of col­or by man­u­al­ly apply­ing lay­ers of light-sen­si­tive gums to the paper. Pho­tog­ra­phy was an ide­al medi­um for evi­dence and the sci­ence of foren­sics, the same dis­ci­pline that now chal­lenges Capa’s shot by using the evi­dence pro­vid­ed by Capa’s own sup­posed fake pho­to! What can be more “evi­den­tial” than a mug shot? No won­der pho­tog­ra­phy has always been close to the field of crim­i­nol­o­gy. In the late nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry, the medi­um was used to sup­port the pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries of Cesare Lom­broso, 5 a bizarre moment in the his­to­ry of crim­i­nol­o­gy, which prompt­ed Alphonse Bertillon and Fran­cis Gal­ton’s “com­pos­ite types”.

 

The “com­pos­ite process” was sup­posed to achieve “pho­to­graph­ic aver­age”:

 

Now we can under­stand Spain’s cul­tur­al min­is­ter’s state­ment above. Only a min­is­ter could implode facts with ideas, reduc­ing epis­te­mol­o­gy to the realm of belief and sci­ence to the realm of aes­thet­ics.  We’ve lost our self-con­fi­dence!
Not much has changed if we go back to the 1930s, when Capa took some of his best war pic­tures. Below is Mau­rice Tabard’s 1930 mon­tage, Stand­ing Nude with Super­im­posed Face.

Alexan­der Rod­chenko’s Girl with a Lei­ka (1934), where the artist explores what art his­to­ri­an Franz Roh called “the joy of real­i­ty and the sub­tle plea­sure of the strange and hid­den in the same sur­round­ing world.”

In the pho­to of Mar­lene Diet­rich by Nicholas Mur­ray (1930), below, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er explores the pub­lic­i­ty “glam­our shot.”

On the oth­er hand, August Sander’s pic­ture of the bak­er (also from 1930), shows an anthro­po­log­i­cal con­cern with the Ger­man Volk.

From the for­mal point of view, Tabard’s mon­tage seems a more rad­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion than Mur­ray or Sander’s pic­tures.  Each pho­tog­ra­ph­er uses the cam­era to sig­ni­fy a con­stant­ly mutat­ing phe­nom­e­non, if not, there would be no use in rep­re­sent­ing it. (the medi­um of) pho­tog­ra­phy sub­verts human inten­tion­al­i­ty. Here is a sim­i­le, which I think Orte­ga-Gas­set would sub­scribe: More than a nov­el, Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote is a “shot” of the Span­ish cul­ture. Just as a lit­er­ary work can be rein­ter­pret­ed, the cam­era “shot” can con­tin­u­al­ly expand its fit.  Put dif­fer­ent­ly, pho­tog­ra­phers don’t “manip­u­late” any more than real­i­ty is being con­stant­ly manip­u­lat­ed by our vision.

In Visu­al intel­li­gence: Per­cep­tion, image, and manip­u­la­tion in visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion (1997). A. M. Bar­ry iden­ti­fies three dif­fer­ent kinds of vio­la­tions: Active decep­tion, when reporters stage events to expose wrong­do­ing or using hid­den cam­eras and micro­phones; mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, with reporters imper­son­at­ing non-reporters—doctors, police­men, vic­tims’ kin, and so on; and pas­sive decep­tion, by which reporters allow them­selves to be tak­en for mem­bers of the pub­lic.

 

What fol­lows is a col­lec­tion of manip­u­lat­ed images from the recent past:6
 
How about the objec­tiv­i­ty of the press?  In 1981, The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for her sto­ry about Jim­my, an 8‑year-old hero­in addict, only to return the award and lose her job after it was dis­cov­ered that Jim­my did not exist.  In 1998, Boston Globe colum­nist Patri­cia Smith was sacked for invent­ing peo­ple and quotes in her columns.  The New Repub­lic fired reporter Stephen Glass for fab­ri­cat­ing all ‑or part- of 27 arti­cles and using pho­ny notes. Pop­u­lar Boston Globe colum­nist Mike Bar­ni­cle was forced to resign fol­low­ing charges of pla­gia­rism.  In 2003, the fall­out over the Jayson Blair scan­dal reached dizzy­ing heights at The New York Times, wide­ly con­sid­ered to be Amer­i­ca’s news­pa­per of record and one of the world’s most influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions.  The Times found that Blair fab­ri­cat­ed quotes, stole mate­ri­als from oth­er news­pa­pers, and lied about his where­abouts over 7 months. Final­ly there’s decep­tion by omis­sion or by com­mis­sion.  The for­mer refers to any act that omits sig­nif­i­cant infor­ma­tion with the inten­tion to ini­ti­ate or sus­tain a false belief.  The lat­ter is an act that involves active or delib­er­ate alter­ation of data. (source from A. M. Bar­ry’s Visu­al intel­li­gence: Per­cep­tion, image, and manip­u­la­tion in visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, 1997).
That pho­to manip­u­la­tion is part of the medi­um’s elas­tic­i­ty does not mean one can­not resist the temp­ta­tion to delib­er­ate­ly “cre­ate” facts, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the infor­ma­tion is rel­e­vant for the pub­lic at large. Stan­dards of objec­tiv­i­ty are indeed dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble.  There is a dif­fer­ence between “fact” and “fab­ri­ca­tion” in the exam­ples above.  Bridg­ing the dis­tinc­tion can have seri­ous con­se­quences.  Which is why, if true, we’d get dis­traught to know that the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty raised the lev­els of secu­ri­ty right before the 2004 elec­tions to influ­ence the vote. Today, jour­nal­ism is syn­ony­mous of cor­po­rate.  Few­er peo­ple read news (or pay atten­tion to news alto­geth­er). Evi­dence shows that the pub­lic holds the press in dimin­ished regard, even con­tempt.  Tele­vi­sion as enter­tain­ment has tak­en over jour­nal­ism as news. The old opinion/fact validity/fallacy news/entertainment dichotomies have been erod­ed.7

No one real­ly knows why some images are des­tined for great­ness.  Imag­ine a kind of pub­lic con­scious­ness muse­um where they end up, after going through a process of exhaust­ing diplo­mat­ic nego­ti­a­tions. To alle­vi­ate our human curios­i­ty, we are giv­en to fill the casu­is­tic holes with all sorts of made-up fac­tors.  At this point, I don’t care if “Falling Sol­dier” is authen­tic. The back-and-forth of the con­tro­ver­sy miss­es the rel­e­vance of the image as a haunt­ing and mem­o­rable token of the beau­ti­ful ideals and hor­ri­ble atroc­i­ties of the Span­ish Civ­il War.  With all this atten­tion, Capa’s pho­to has become one of the most crit­i­cal war sym­bols of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. One way or the oth­er, he should be proud.
_____________________
*The cap­tion reads, “Robert Capa’s cam­era catch­es a Span­ish sol­dier the instant a bul­let drops him through the head in front of Cór­do­ba.” 1 Though Ser­ra­no Esparza­’s account is a bit wind­ed ‑and not my con­cern here- a cru­cial aspect of the dis­cus­sion is whether (Moroc­can pro-Fran­co) rebel snipers were present at the cer­ro that morn­ing. 2In his book, along with Gal­lagher’s tes­ti­mo­ny, Knight­ley reports what peo­ple say Capa said. His final ver­dict is that the pic­ture is an “ambigu­ous image.” 3 The Span­ish film’s trail­er clev­er­ly uses Capa’s iden­ti­ty cre­ation right dur­ing the war from Endre Ernő Fried­mann (aka André Fried­mann). Sure­ly, Capa’s life seems out of a movie. Accord­ing to the Wikipedia entry, “In 1934, André Fried­man, as he called him­self then, met Ger­da Poho­rylle, a Ger­man Jew­ish refugee. The cou­ple lived in Paris, where André taught Ger­da pho­tog­ra­phy. Togeth­er, they con­trived the name and image of “Robert Capa” as a famous Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Ger­da took the name Ger­da Taro, becom­ing suc­cess­ful in her own right. She trav­eled with Capa to Spain in 1936 to doc­u­ment the Span­ish Civ­il War. In July 1937, Capa went on a short busi­ness trip to Paris while Ger­da remained in Madrid. She was killed near Brunete dur­ing a bat­tle. Capa, who was report­ed­ly engaged to her, was deeply shocked and nev­er mar­ried.” 4 The Broth­er­hood of the Linked Ring was an asso­ci­a­tion of late 19th and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry British pho­tog­ra­phers who pledged to pro­mote Pic­to­ri­al­ism. Found­ed in May 1892 by Hen­ry Peach Robin­son, the Broth­er­hood was “a means of bring­ing togeth­er those who are inter­est­ed in the devel­op­ment of the high­est form of Art of which Pho­tog­ra­phy is capa­ble.” 5 Lom­broso stat­ed in 1871: “Only we white peo­ple have reached the ulti­mate sym­me­try of bod­i­ly form.” 6 For details of these and oth­er recent pic manip­u­la­tions, click here. 7 Accord­ing to William Hatch­en and Lawrence Earl­baum, we are expe­ri­enc­ing “a col­lec­tive sense of the end of an era.” A Nie­man poll on 304 jour­nal­ists who had stud­ied at Har­vard for one year dis­closed the fol­low­ing: 1‑The dis­tinc­tion between news and enter­tain­ment is increas­ing­ly obscure.  2‑Television and radio are gain­ing in influ­ence but declin­ing in jour­nal­is­tic qual­i­ty, where­as news­pa­pers strug­gle to main­tain qual­i­ty and are los­ing ground.  3‑Media pro­pri­etors are more con­cerned with prof­its than prod­uct qual­i­ty.  4‑The pub­lic is los­ing con­fi­dence in the media.

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