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rfmcdonaldThe news that Robert Capa's famous photo of a Spanish Republican soldier caught in the middle of his death
may have been staged has triggered a fierce debate, in Spain and elsewhere, on the circumstances of this particlar photo, its role in the collective memory of the Spanish Civil War, and the nature of photography itself as an honest reporter.
Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram discusses the situation himself.
Gefter's essay, incidentally, is quite worth reading, and not only because it lists some of the most notable examples of supposedly spontaneous events that turn out to be staged. This, though, does not save Capa for Bertram: "We could say that he is an icon standing for the many soldiers who did in fact die for the Republic, but that doesn’t feel right since it would be hard for the image to play that role for us if we knew that the man was simply acting. Brandt’s subjects were (barely) acting, but they were at least playing parts that they also played in life. And for reasons Susan Sontag discussed long ago, the fact of photographic selection means that even where a picture appears to have a definite semantic charge, it would be naive to take that as a veridical report, since the image may well have been chosen for that effect from a sequence of which all the rest conveyed a quite different impression."
I take photos partly as recreation, partly as a form of documentation of my environment, always with the intent of transferring something as accurately as I can. I'm so concerned with this that I don't even use Photoshop
And you?
may have been staged has triggered a fierce debate, in Spain and elsewhere, on the circumstances of this particlar photo, its role in the collective memory of the Spanish Civil War, and the nature of photography itself as an honest reporter.
[B]eginning in the 1970s, researchers and historians began to challenge the picture's veracity and raise questions about Capa's reputation: Did the famous photograph capture the militiaman at the moment of his death, or was it staged? Now comes a claim that new and "indisputable" evidence determines once and for all that the photograph is a fake. "We tried to reconstruct the events exactly as they would have to have occurred for Capa's photo to have been taken during a military conflict," says Ernest Alos, the reporter for Cataluna's daily El Periodico who has led the latest inquiry. "And we discovered that the picture does not correspond to any actual event." (See pictures of Capa's work.)
Yet the findings, published by El Periodico on July 17, are about more than that one shot — or the Capa mythology it fuelled. The latest investigation may settle any questions about the actual location of Capa's image, but despite its focus on historical accuracy, it is unlikely to end all debate about the photograph's authenticity. What the study does reveal is Spain's growing interest in the role that visual documents might play in understanding the country's complex — and still unresolved — relationship with its civil war.
With the arrival of the exhibition "This is War! Robert Capa at Work" currently on display in Barcelona's Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Alos notes that local experts were able to observe several additional photographs Capa took of the Spanish Civil War that had never before been exhibited in Spain. "This is important because these photos are part of our history, and here we know our country's geography and history better than those in New York or London," he says. (See a TIME video on Capa's iconic work.)
Alos and his colleagues came to the conclusion that Capa's photo had been staged by following the lead of Jose Manuel Susperregu, photography professor at the University of the Basque Country. Having closely examined the previously unseen photographs, Susperregu sent two of them to the governing councils of towns near Andalusia's Cerro Muriano, where Capa's photo purportedly was taken, and received confirmation that the landscape seen in the picture is actually located roughly 30 miles (50 km) away, near Espejo, a Cordoban town isolated from the war's battle zone. The El Periodico reporters spoke with the people of Espejo and with historians of the Civil War, and learned that no military conflicts had taken place in the area during the days when Capa took the photograph.
Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram discusses the situation himself.
I’m inclined to agree with the thought that the staging in that case also amounts to fakery. Still, I’m far from certain about my reactions here: staging a photograph is not, in itself, sufficient to make the charge stick. I was thinking last night about the US Civil War photographs where we suspect the photographers rearranged the bodies, and that is one of the examples that Philip Gefter discusses in an essay on the problem at the New York Times. Many of Bill Brandt’s photographs of English upper and working-class lives were staged, but that staging doesn’t make them bogus. Rather Brandt was using artifice to get his subjects to enact a role more general than any particular haphazard moment. That also seems true of the Lewis Hine pictures that Gefter discusses.
Gefter's essay, incidentally, is quite worth reading, and not only because it lists some of the most notable examples of supposedly spontaneous events that turn out to be staged. This, though, does not save Capa for Bertram: "We could say that he is an icon standing for the many soldiers who did in fact die for the Republic, but that doesn’t feel right since it would be hard for the image to play that role for us if we knew that the man was simply acting. Brandt’s subjects were (barely) acting, but they were at least playing parts that they also played in life. And for reasons Susan Sontag discussed long ago, the fact of photographic selection means that even where a picture appears to have a definite semantic charge, it would be naive to take that as a veridical report, since the image may well have been chosen for that effect from a sequence of which all the rest conveyed a quite different impression."
I take photos partly as recreation, partly as a form of documentation of my environment, always with the intent of transferring something as accurately as I can. I'm so concerned with this that I don't even use Photoshop
And you?
