Thursday, September 25, 2008

That war photograph




A 70-year debate over the authenticity of a Robert Capa photograph dating back to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) may have been settled by an upcoming exhibition...

Artinfo on a new show at London's Barbican.
“Looking at the photos it is clear that it is not the heat of battle," said Cynthia Young, the curator of the show.

The Barbican show.


Some background from Richard Whelan and PBS.
The picture is one of Capa’s two most famous (the other being of a GI landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day), and it has often been hailed as the greatest war photograph of all time.

The allegation had first surfaced in 1975, in a book by Phillip Knightley, a British journalist and historian, about how war correspondents — ever since the beginning of the profession, during the Crimean War of the 1850s — had often distorted the truth.

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