anxious images: controversy shadows Robert Capa

Photo EFE/ Szilard Koszticsak. This detail of the photograph on ArtDaily shows curator Zita Sor shot posing caught with Robert Capa’s famous image of a falling soldier, is at the centre of the storm of controversy that follows the iconic Capa image. Further questions about the authenticity of the photograph have been raised in the context of the traveling exhibition This Is War: Robert Capa at Work… “which re-examines Capa’s innovations as a photojournalist in the 1930s and 1940s with vintage prints, contact sheets, caption sheets, handwritten observations, personal letters and original magazine layouts from the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.”  The exhibition is currently on display at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya until September 27.

One account in Aperture says yes: “Proving that Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” is Genuine: A Detective Story” by Richard Whelan. He concludes: “May the slanderous controversy that has plagued Robert Capa’s reputation for more than twenty-five years now, at last, come to an end with a verdict decisively in favor of Capa’s integrity. It is time to let both Capa and Borrell [the subject] rest in peace, and to acclaim The Falling Soldier once again as an unquestioned masterpiece of photojournalism and as perhaps the greatest war photograph ever made.”

Another is ambivalent: read Philip Gefter on photography and truth-telling in the NYT Lens blog. He concludes “…somewhere between fact and fiction — or perhaps hovering slightly above either one — is the province of metaphor, where the truth is approximated in renderings of a more poetic or symbolic nature.” Plus see a subsequent report in the NYT Art & Design pages…

Thanks to James Steele’s eagle eye (see comment below) Mail Online nails it with the before and after photographic evidence.

Yet surely this is not just a mere play of metaphor, or the outing of a propagandistic fiction? Beyond its iconic function, in its thousands of subsequent contexts, lies the reality of the subject of the photograph’s destiny: did Borrell live, or die? Now look at this…

What the? I’ve always wondered whether this anti-Soviet poster produced in Peshawar in the early ’80s was somehow based on Capa’s iconic image of the falling soldier. There’s plenty of evidence that the propaganda artists of this campaign were happy to appropriate other images from the West. This is one image that didn’t make the cut into Martha Vogel’s landmark study Roter Teufel: machtiger mugahid (Bohlau, Weimar, 2008). But if there was a relation between these two images, it’s surely a bizarre transformation! Compare and contrast with this detail of the Capa photograph… Is it a Yes? or a No?

PS the text on the poster is simultaneously ironic and mysteriously specific: along the top it reads (thanks to MR) “belakhare gheirat-mand shodi” which means “at last, you become zealous!” Or “at last, you gain honour!” This, as the man is being shot by an “askar” – which means a (“good”, ie, honorable) guard or soldier. The text on the black rectangle reads “Shendand” which may refer to events at the Shindand airbase, built by the Soviets south of Herat to give them a strategic influence over the Gulf region…