IT is one of the most famous war photographs and also one of the most contentious. For decades many have argued that Robert Capa’s picture of a soldier being shot in the Spanish civil war was faked.

Now new evidence from 20 years of research, documented by newly discovered photographs, could clear Capa once and for all. The evidence says that the photograph is genuine. But it also suggests that Capa captured his famous “shot” almost by accident: he was taking pictures of simulated battle scenes when an enemy machinegun opened up and started cutting down his subjects with real bullets.

Many still consider it to be the best war photograph, but its reputation has been dogged for 30 years by allegations of possible camera trickery.

The elements which give it such universal meaning also make it vulnerable to fakery claims. There are few clues to the location and no one is pictured other than the falling man whose face is blurred. There is no blood and no sign of an entry wound. The photograph also raises questions as to how Capa happened to be next to him at the moment he was shot.

The photograph’s reputation has not been helped by misleading captions - not written by Capa - which said the man had been shot through the head at the height of a battle.

Sceptics say that Capa was committed to the Republican cause and wanted an image of a soldier being shot dead by Franco’s fascists, who were backed by Germany and Italy. Capa was alleged to have staged it so that it could become, in effect, a propaganda photograph to gain sympathy for the Republicans.

The photograph, known as The Falling Soldier, captures the moment a Republican militiaman was shot dead on September 5, 1936 and shows him collapsing backwards, one arm outstretched as he lets slip his rifle. Critics remained unconvinced even when the soldier was identified as Federico Borrell Garcia, 24, by his brother who said that he did indeed die on that day.

However, 40 images taken on the day and being presented at an exhibition next month at London’s Barbican Centre indicate that the photograph was genuine. They were unearthed recently at the International Centre of Photography in New York, which was founded by Cornell, Capa’s brother.

The exhibition will display images, including many negatives of soldiers taken by Capa on the same day. They show a group of soldiers which include Borrell. One, taken a few minutes before his death, shows him with his rifle raised above his head. Another shows a second soldier shot very close to Borrell. Yet another is a negative of Borrell taken by Gerda Taro, Capa’s girlfriend.

The exhibition, with several of her photographs, will also prove she was with Capa with her own camera on that day.

“These new images and detailed research work go a long way to support the case that the photo is real,” said Cynthia Young, who has organised the exhibition. “If Capa had simply done this one extraordinary shot and then not much else then I might understand the doubters. But he did so many other remarkable war photos, like those on D-Day, that it is in keeping with their standard and style.”

The doubters were led by Phillip Knightley, the journalist who, working for The Sunday Times in 1975, wrote a book, The First Casualty. A war reporter had told him that on the day the photograph was taken Capa was in Hendaye in northern Spain with Franco’s forces.

After 20 years of research, Richard Whelan, Capa’s biographer who compiled the exhibition catalogue before his recent death, concluded that the anti-fascist Capa “would never have had anything to do with Franco’s troops”.

Whelan had also confirmed that in early September 1936 Capa was not in Hendaye but in Cerro Muriano in Andalucia where the soldier was shot.

Capa sent the film roll, uncaptioned, to his studio in Paris before the Falling Soldier photograph first appeared with several others in Vu, the French magazine. Underneath the picture someone had written about the soldiers “clenching their rifles running down the slope. Suddenly their soaring was interrupted, a bullet whistled and their blood was drunk by their native soil”.

More hyperbole was used when the picture appeared in Life magazine. The caption stated: “Robert Capa’s camera catches a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head.” It mistook the thrown-back tassel on the soldier’s cap for a piece of his skull being blown off.

The Barbican exhibition will show a photograph of a second soldier, also shot, taken by the 22-year-old Capa on his Leica later that day. It is clear that it is on the same hillside though there are some differences.

“This is what makes me still have doubts,” said Knightley this weekend. “Why are the two men in the same spot? It is very odd indeed. Where is the body of the first man? And why has no negative ever turned up? I’m still sticking to my view that it was a fake.” The exhibition makes it clear that Capa immediately sent his roll of film to Paris where it was developed before being cut up with different photographs sent to different sources, losing the chronological order. Negatives were lost or mislaid.

Whelan and Young both argue that Borrell’s body could have been retrieved by his comrades seconds before the second man was shot.

Whelan concludes that Capa began his “shoot” photographing a group of militiamen in simulated battle scenes during the afternoon siesta which both sides observed and during which no fighting took place.

The men began running down the hillside with Capa and Taro running beside them. He speculates that the men aimed and fired, attracting the enemy’s attention. Borrell climbed out of a gully. “Perhaps the intended result was a heroic standing portrait,” concludes Whelan. “Just as Capa was about to press his shutter release, a hidden enemy machinegun opened fire.”

Capa, born Endre Friedmann in Hungary before he moved to France and changed his name, was killed by a landmine in what is now Vietnam, then part of French Indochina, while covering the war there in 1954. He died with his camera in his hand.

Frontline fakery

THE camera can lie. Images from the Crimean war, the Indian mutiny and the American civil war had to be staged for the benefit of the early cameras that required lengthy exposures. But much of the most famous historical film from the 20th century, which is repeatedly shown to millions of people around the world, was faked.

In some cases battle scenes purporting to be genuine were shot in film studios and then mixed with less dramatic footage.

Desert Victory, about the north African campaign, was an Oscar-winning film released in 1943 for the Ministry of Information by the film units of the army and the RAF. Because of the difficulties presented by filming night battles, some of the “footage” was shot at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

Field Marshal Montgomery arranged for “action” scenes to be filmed well behind the frontline and before the battle of El Alamein began in October 1942. Footage of the D-Day landings in 1944 was doctored using film recorded during the invasion rehearsal at Slapton Sands in Devon.

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