Making of ‘Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Córdoba front, Spain, early September 1936’ (by Robert Capa, 1936), 2016

The story behind the photograph…

The photograph of the death of a loyalist militiaman, sometimes known as ‘The Falling Soldier’, taken by Robert Capa (1913–1954), has been called one of the greatest war photographs ever made. It captures the very moment of death near Espejo in Córdoba, Spain, in early September 1936, of a Republican militiaman. Or does it? Since the mid-1970s, doubts have been raised over the photograph’s authenticity. Staged photographs were relatively common during the first year of the Spanish Civil War, as photojournalists were granted only limited access to fields of combat. Capa himself gave contradictory accounts of the taking of the photograph – his vantage point, his technique, whether the deadly weapon was a machine gun or a sniper’s rifle. The negative is thought to have been lost in the 1930s.