> > I don't think it's OT in the least. > > I find it a bit shocking. Other greats have faked their work > and still I doubt that it can be argued that Capa wasn't a > great photographer. I read that he chose the name Capa to > mimic Capra, as in Frank Capra, the iconic American Director. > I suppose that sort of personality is not adverse to fudging > at times. Still, this is pretty remarkable. > > -Brendan > > > > New claims that the iconic war image was staged: > > > > > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1201116/How- > Capas-camera-does-lie-The-photographic-proof-iconic-Falling-So > ldier-image-staged.ht > >
I think you - and the loathsome Daily Mail - are taking a step too far there. How do you make the connection from changing his name to be like Capra to 'that sort of personality is not adverse to fudging'? Millions of people have changed their names, especially refugees, and had all sorts of reasons to choose what they wanted - what's wrong with choosing something that sounds like Capra in order to give people a warm impression of you? What would you have preferred him to choose? Hitler? Mussolini? Stalin? The Independent newspaper (UK) published the photographs yesterday and the sequence from Capa's film compared to the modern sequence looks quite convincing. But there is also a lot of very convincing evidence that the soldier has been identified as someone who was killed on the date the picture was taken. There are a lot of possibilities other than fakery. Capa himself did not caption the picture - that was done by the editors of the magazine that first published it, and they may well have jumped to unwarranted conclusions about what it showed. Should Capa have corrected that later? Yes, if he knew it was wrong. But who's to say he knew it was wrong? He was moving around a lot of places, shooting a lot of film - often he and Taro didn't even know which of them had taken which picture. To expect them to remember the places and dates of every picture they took is ridiculous under those circumstances. He probably didn't even know he'd captured this image, so there's no reason why it should have stuck in his memory. Capa was undoubtedly a self-mythologiser, but in my view you can't make the leap from that and from this new evidence, to calling the picture a set-up and a fake, which both imply long-term deception by Capa, until you have evidence that Capa himself intentionally deceived people, or allowed them to be deceived, throughout his career. The rest of his honourable career seems to me to be strong evidence against that possibility. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
