Article
The truth is rarely so black and white
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.
We were not being knowingly manipulated, as in, say, Casablanca, to think about love; or as in Saving Private Ryan, ditto war. We were being offered veracity, the real deal: we thought we had discovered, almost by ourselves, simply by looking at a picture, something about life, not art. We were told this happened, not something like this.
It is hard not to feel a certain sympathy for the young Capa (who surely went far to redeeming himself afterwards, carving a deserved reputation as one of the bravest, brightest photojournalists ever): knowing that what he represented was happening, or at least something like this, and desperate to tell of it. There are huge temptations, in the lives of most journalists, to butter things around in order that the simplicity and power of a story or a picture is enhanced, because they know the essential truth to be fairly represented.
Cleaning up quotes for grammar and context is surely on the right side of the line, as is cropping a picture for impact. Changing quotes to alter substantially the sense: or knowing that inmates are being tortured in Abu Ghraib, and thus absolutely faking the pictures, these, we have seen, are not.
Those who cross the line damage, obviously, themselves. Capa is now retrospectively flawed. Arthur Rothstein, who moved a cow's skull 10 feet for a better picture of America's dustbowl disaster, was ruined by Republicans accusing him of fakery and exaggeration for political ends. But they also damage, they have damaged, they continue to damage, the future.
In a world saturated with new media, at a time when it is easier than ever to fake a photograph, or spread partisan "facts" of dubious authenticity and lineage, it is more crucial than ever that what we see and read can be trusted. Every time something turns out to have crossed the line, it damages all our futures, because it damages all our trusts. Capa is culpable and it's a crying shame. It almost shouldn't matter, but it does. It matters more today, that he did what he did, than it mattered on that day in 1936. When men were dying, like this, in cheap clothes, in the sun, on a forlorn hillside. Thirty miles away.
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User Comments
Fentonchem
26 July 2009 1:54AM
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Auric
26 July 2009 3:59AM
Please forgive me for stumbling awkwardly all round the houses just to avoid the word "iconic".
As we all got by without this ridiculous word until very recently, why the problem? Using it would more mark you as as a poor writer.
namordnik
26 July 2009 6:06AM
Truth is always more horrible than fiction or art. Great photography is (always?) an art. So nobody would had said the photo was great if it wasn't an art.
harlan
26 July 2009 6:27AM
What we need is far greater scepticism, questioning, challenging of all we see, read, hear, experience, including our own perceptions.
It is more crucial than ever that what we see and read is NOT trusted.
Most news reporting has always been artifice to greater or lesser degrees; journalists usually lack even basic knowledge of what they're reporting.
Couple that with inbuilt biases - subconscious or otherwise -, editorial pressures, time limits, need to sensationalise.. its mostly entertainment.
The internet has provided a much needed kick up the arse to journalism as it's so much easier to puncture its pretension to accuracy, balance, professionalism.
The 'net has also spawned huge amounts of garbage, a proliferation of batty, deceptive, erroneous blogs amongst a substantial minority of hugely informative, dedicated ones that put most professional jounos to shame.
Those who've sussed the 'net suspect all they see and hear, online and off.
It has always been easier to fake than be frank.
Most of us live most of our lives in denial of reality; it was the condition of existence, of survival.
In journalism, as in life, truth was the rare, hard fought for, stubborn exception.
MartynInEurope
26 July 2009 8:00AM
Of course, another explanation could be that the photos were not all taken in the same place, because the only "evidence" is through association, which may or may not be an accurate association. It's quite possible that Capa took photographs in and around Cerro Muriano and also in and around El Espejo. So, far from being conclusive, the evidence is still very much speculative.
MartynInEurope
26 July 2009 9:20AM
Please forgive me for stumbling awkwardly all round the houses just to avoid the word "iconic".
As we all got by without this ridiculous word until very recently, why the problem?
Oh those terribly modern, fashionable amd progressive Greeks and their modern language. εἰκών, whatever next? Why can't writers just stick to good old fashion English words, such as: phenomenon; tetrahedron; crisis; hypothesis; stigma; schema, and lexicon?
redbigbill
26 July 2009 3:12PM
Who cares, photo served it's purpose.
Wasn't the flag raising on Iwo Jima supposed to have been 'posed' (not fake as shot behind the lines) as well?
oldonmk2
26 July 2009 4:39PM
redbigbill
Who cares, photo served it's purpose.
Wasn't the flag raising on Iwo Jima supposed to have been 'posed' (not fake as shot behind the lines) as well?
Yes the Iwo Jima flag was originally too small, and none of the dogfaces had a camera anyway! So the brass sent for a ohotographer, and had them put up a bigger flag! Loads of wartime photos were faked!
I have a number of books on warfare & photography, and can see a good number of faked up, or falsely captioned photos therein! I know that lots of photos are "faked" as most news outlets have their own agenda, and use photos that support it!
BJPlan
26 July 2009 7:47PM
The end of PLP, we retake the politics of the Labour Party: The Beijing Plan.
MELANIEBELLAMY
27 July 2009 8:36AM
Amazing Piers Morgan's attempts only took two weeks to be discovered as fakes !
Mel Bel x
Darkblade
27 July 2009 3:27PM
Is this still going? I thought it was known ages ago that this photo was a fake. It was certainly suspected way back in 2000-ish cos I remember discussing it at uni.
And no, I don't think it matters. (It might have mattered at the time if he was getting paid more for producing 'truth', but now? Not really.)
gingerjon
27 July 2009 5:09PM
Wasn't this proved last year to be resolutely not a fake? Or was that only because the Barbican had an exhibition to promote?
Capa was a hard-hearted bastard. It wouldn't surprise me if he fired both the camera and the gun to get the picture he wanted.
marcomori
28 July 2009 4:36AM
If on one hand the question on authenticity of the "Falling Soldier" has been settled, there are other questions worth pursuing now. Capa was a great photographer, and my guess is that, at that point in life, he probably thought that that picture could be published somewhere and that was it. We should keep in mind that it was the work of the very young Capa, not the great Capa we think of. But the picture took a life of its own, as great works of art often do, and was able to capture the horrors of war in a single moment. What could he do then? No photographer could have predicted the impact that that picture would have in the years to follow. So, in this sense I would say that the photo should not be considered as completely fake: it was staged, sure, but it revealed what war is, and this is, too, one of the things photography should do - enhance reality.
jimmyshashin
28 July 2009 8:14PM
"But if it's everywhere and all the time, and so easy to make, then whats of value? which pictures matter? Is it the hard won photograph, knowing, controlled, previsualised? Yes. Or are those contrived, dry and belabored? Sometimes. Is it the offhand snapshot made on a whim. For sure. Or is that just a lucky observation, some random moment caught by chance? Maybe. Is it an intuitive expression of liquid intelligence? Exactly. Or the distillation of years of looking seeing thinking photography. Definitely."
Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult, by Paul Graham, 2009
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/07/theory-paul-graham-photography-is-easy.html
albinorex
26 July 2009 1:15AM
I don't believe it!