The Photo that Never Dies

One could safely say that the photo that made Robert Capa was his "Death of a Spanish Soldier," shot during the Civil War in Spain in 1936.  Yet in the years since it was made -- most particularly in the last 30 or so -- it has become increasingly mired in controversy.

I wrote about it a few years ago for the NPPA, when I thought the newest clue, far from proving the photo a fake, simply provided a difference without a distinction.  Now we have Capa himself telling the story of it, a similar story to another version he wrote before.  This is actually rather unusual, as he was notoriously reluctant to talk about it.  Why?

The usual theory was that the event had profoundly upset him.  Remember, when the picture was made, Capa was a young man just starting out.  While he affected an air of nonchalance (even then), Spain was his first serious war coverage, and like any real war, it wasn't pretty.  (Let's keep in mind, this is the fighting that brought us Guernica.)

"Guernica"

Also, he was in the throes of his first, perhaps most profound and some say greatest love.  He and Gerta Taro (nee Pohorylle -- like Capa, who was born Andre Friedmann, she chose a literal nom de guerre) were at the least linked when the picture was made (she was with him, also making photos).  Not long after, Gerda was killed in Spain, still covering the war, while Capa was in China covering the fighting there.  Some say the love had died (she was in the company of another man when killed), some not, but there is an air of tragedy about the affair and his accounts of it.  I like to think that he always looked on her as The One, lost to death and time, and thus another reason he didn't like to talk about the events then.

However, here's something else I think: In that 1947 interview, he's lying.

As I say in the NPPA piece, I don't think there was a machine gun, let alone four waves of attacks to take it.  I think a bunch of relatively inexperienced soldiers were running around in a field playing at battle for the cameras when everything turned horribly real.  I don't think Capa even meant to take that picture.  Rather, he flinched when the shot was fired and accidentally triggered the shutter.  I think the men then ran around trying to assemble some sort of response, getting at least one more of them killed, before a sniper melted back into the landscape.  And most of all, I think Capa was embarrassed by what he saw as personal cowardice, disgusted by his own profit from the situation, and finally trapped by the myth that rose up around the picture.

So he finally, through a few reluctant retellings, assembled a more acceptable story probably based on his later experiences in combat, something that could be disposed of quickly with a minimum of questions, thus sparing him the need to dwell on his unpleasant and ambivalent feelings on the event.  It's a more public version of what we all do when trying to explain later some embarrassing mistake or unhappy argument, for example.

But here's the thing: it's just my guess based on personal experience in life and photography and some research.