Preponderance of the Evidence

I'd known about the controversy surrounding Robert Capa's photo of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War being shot while I took a class on the war in college, but the Times reported yesterday on new evidence that it can't have been taken where Capa said it was. I'm not sure I care about whether the picture was misidentified by location: the power of a man falling after being shot seems relevant no matter the battle. But I do think it matters if it was faked in its entirety. The image's power rests, I think, in our sense that we're seeing something taboo: a man's violent death. Were we there, we would cry out at the sight, we might, depending on our positions among his comrades or his enemies, attempt to intervene. If it's faked, then our reaction is the result of deception.

I don't object to being had when I know I'm being had. The emotion I feel under those circumstances is different: if I see someone die on screen, I know I'm reacting to the idea of someone dying. If I'm seeing art that presents itself as a representation of an actual death, I'm reacting in part to the idea, and in part as an actual mourner, even if I didn't know the person who died. To have that sharper emotion turned against me by a talented fake is something I resent. It's why memoirists who fake their work bother me so much. Memoirs draw their power from life. If you have to lie about whether your narrative was real or not, it's probably not compelling enough to be fiction, which I think is what most phony memoirists actually want to feel they are good enough to write and publish. Truth is an emotional accelerant. Its misuse can burn more than the person who starts the fire.

But with something like the Capa photo, I can't imagine it'll be proved definitively, one way or another, that the image is either the actual record of a death, or a well-staged one. No matter what, it's tarnished, and we're stuck with that tarnish. Capa is gone, the man in the picture is gone. We can search down mountain profiles all we want. But we'll never know.