“If your pictures aren’t good enough,” Robert Capa once remarked, “then you’re not close enough.” For more than 35 years, Capa’s 1936 photograph “Death of a Militiaman” — arguably the most enduring image of the Spanish Civil War — commanded worldwide acclaim and helped establish Capa as the archetypal modern war photographer. But beginning 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.
