An image that became synonymous with the Spanish Civil War and catapulted the photographer Robert Capa to fame is a fake, new research has confirmed.
The Falling Soldier, showing a Spanish fighter apparently frozen in the moment of his death, was published by Life magazine in 1937. The caption read: “Robert Capa’s camera captures the instant when a Spanish soldier is shot in the head by a bullet on the Cordoba front”.
Capa, who died in 1954 aged 40, always insisted that it was not fake, but its authenticity has long been questioned. The New York Times said in an editorial in 2009: “The beauty and the pristine authority of the image would be horribly, tragically undermined if it turned out that this picture
