Death of a Loyalist Soldier

‘Death of a Loyalist Soldier’ is a photo taken by war photographer and photojournalist  Robert Capa and is claimed to have been taken on September 5, 1936. It depicts the exact moment of death when a republican soldier in the was shot in Battle of Cerro Muriano in the Spanish Civil War. Picture Post, a pioneering photojournalism magazine published in the United Kingdom, had once described then twenty-five year old Capa as “the greatest war photographer in the world” and his ‘falling solider’ photo is said to be the most iconic image of the Spanish Civil War.

The composition of this image makes it look like the moment was unanticipated because of how the horizon isn’t straight and how the soldier feet are touching the bottom of the image. If the moment was anticipated than Capa would have set up a better composition in the photo, but because it was unexpected he didn’t have time. This is also indicated through the blurriness in some parts of the image where Capa had to take the photo quickly. The photo is black and white because it was taken in 1936 making the image more formal and leads the audiences eye to the soldier straight away. The foreground of the image shows the soldier being shot and falling back towards the ground and the background displays mountains out of focus, showing how the image was unanticipated.

Doubts have been raised since 1975 in relation to the authenticity of the image. In José Manuel Susperregui’s 2009 book “Shadows of Photography”, he concludes that the photograph was not taken at Cerro Muriano, but at another location about 30 miles away. He said this meant that the Falling Soldier photograph ‘was staged, as were all the others in the same series, supposedly taken on the front.

This position the solider is in makes the image seem authentic as his arm holding the gun has been thrown backwards like he’s just been shot. But the likelihood of catching the exact moment a soldier was shot is very unlikely making the claims against Robert Capa more believable, but still isn’t evidence. But the environment surrounding the soldier doesn’t look like it was taken in the ‘heat of the battle’ said Mr. Hartshorn making the image looked like it’s staged.

This photo above is of another man from the same sequence as “The Falling Soldier.” A researcher has used the mountains to identify what he says is the picture’s correct location. Cynthia Young, curator of the Robert Capa Archive at the I.C.P “very possibly didn’t remember” where he took the picture, probably leaving his agents and editors back in Paris to make a guess when they developed his film, defending the authenticity.

Capa described how he took the photograph in a 1947 radio interview:

I was there in the trench with about twenty milicianos … I just kind of put my camera above my head and even [sic] didn’t look and clicked the picture, when they moved over the trench. And that was all. … [T]hat camera which I hold [sic] above my head just caught a man at the moment when he was shot. That was probably the best picture I ever took. I never saw the picture in the frame because the camera was far above my head

Richard Whelan, in This Is War! Robert Capa at Work, states, ‘It is neither a photograph of a man pretending to have been shot, nor an image made during what we would normally consider the heat of battle.’

Although Capa’s image could have been staged, the exposure he gave to the public about war by portraying a soldier the moment he was shot was effective and displays the turmoil that’s experienced in war.

“Which ever way you view the authenticity of his work and the identity he created, the impact that Capa has had cannot be denied. Every photograph taken represents a metaphor that will eternally last in the viewer’s mind, depicting a time riven with devastation that is still felt today. It is these timeless reverberations his photography has created that made him ‘the greatest war photographer in the world’.” (Andrew Kingsford-Smith)

In his July 1998 article, Phillip Knightley deniedthe importance of Brotóns’s discovery and stated “The famous photograph is almost certainly a fake—Capa posed it.” He went on to argue, “Federico could have posed for the photograph before he was killed.” Richard Whelan sought the advice of a forensic expert, Captain Robert L.Franks, the chief homicide detective of the Memphis Police Department. to my request. In his analysis, he said that the first thing that struck him as odd about The Falling Soldier was that the man in the photograph “had been standing flat footed when he was shot. He clearly was not in stride when he was shot.”  He went on to write, “Was this picture posed? I think not, based on the human reflex response. You will notice that the soldier’s left hand, which is partially showing under his left leg, is in a semi-closed position. If the fall was, in fact, staged, the hand would be open to catch his fall.  The deduction that the man had been carrying his rifle in a was suggesting that he did not expect to use it soon led Richard Whelan  to reconsider the story.

 “They were fooling around,” [Capa] said. “We all were fooling around. We felt good. There was no shooting. They came running down the slope. I ran too and knipsed.”                             “Did you tell them to stage an attack?” asked Mieth.
“Hell no. We were all happy. A little crazy,
maybe.”
“And then?”
“Then, suddenly it was the real thing. I didn’t
hear the firing—not at first.”
“Where were you?”
“Out there, a little ahead and to the side of
them.”

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283315