Battlelines redrawn over war photo

MADRID - New evidence has emerged that one of the most famous war photographs, shot during the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, was taken away from the battlefield, reopening the debate as to whether it is a fake.

Capa's dramatic The Falling Soldier, the photograph of a Spanish militiaman being killed by a bullet as he charges down a slope, was taken kilometres away from where the civil war was being fought, according to a university lecturer, Jose Manuel Susperregui.

Susperregui, who teaches communications studies at the University of the Basque Country in northern Spain and specialises in photography, has analysed a series of pictures taken by the Hungarian-born war photographer and claims to have recreated a common countryside in the background. He claims that the real location of The Falling Soldier is far away from the Cerro Muriano front where Capa claimed that the picture was taken.

Susperregui's research, published in his book Sombras de la Fotografia, provides compelling evidence that The Falling Soldier was photographed in Llano de Banda, an area of countryside close to the small village of Espejo, southern Spain, 40km from Cerro Muriano.

Although the land itself, which was arable when Capa was there, has had olive trees growing on it for the past three decades, the skyline created by a nearby set of hills closely matches that of the celebrated war photographer's own pictures.

"The landscape around Cerro Muriano looks nothing like that in the photographs," said Susperregui. "I have no doubt that this was taken in Llano de Banda."

There was fighting in August 1936 in Llano de Banda, but Capa was in Barcelona at the time. Local historians say the battle did not restart in the area until late September, by which time his picture had reached the offices of France's Vu magazine.

"My theory is that Capa went to Espejo because he knew it had been an active front. He found nothing going on there, so did the posed photographs," Susperregui said. "Then he went on to Cerro Muriano, which was active, and took a different set of photographs there of people fleeing the fighting."

Capa's biographer, Richard Whelan, suggested in the catalogue for a recent exhibition in London that he might have been posing the picture when the victim was spotted by a sniper from Franco's rebel nationalist forces and shot.

But according to Susperregui: "There was no fighting in this area at this time. The front was quiet. The war had moved on. It did not come back here until later in September."

Doubts about the authenticity of The Falling Man were first voiced by Philip Knightley in his book The First Casualty 34 years ago, which raised the possibility that the photograph had been staged with the help of Republican soldiers.

But Susperregui's theory is the first to question the location of the image. Capa, who died after stepping on a landmine in Vietnam while photographing the war there in 1954, never contradicted the general assumption that the photograph portrayed a soldier at the instant of his death.

If Susperregui is right, his theory has significant consequences for another controversy - the identity of the soldier. A Spanish academic, Hugo Domenech, has argued that the dead man is not Federico Borrell Garcia - an anarchist militiaman named as the victim by the Spanish historian Mario Brotons in 1995. In a prize-winning documentary film made last year, Domenech produced a 1937 eyewitness account of Borrell's death. This was published in the anarchist Ruta Confederal magazine and describes him dying in Cerro Muriano behind a tree he used as cover.

There are no trees in Capa's photographs. "This is not Cerro Muriano, so we can now be absolutely sure that the victim was not Borrell," said Susperregui.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is convinced. Capa's legacy is now largely managed by the International Centre of Photography (ICP), founded by his brother, Cornell, in New York.

Cynthia Young, an ICP curator, said a picture of the militiamen pointing their weapons had been found recently in the centre's archives. She agreed that the three photographs were taken in the same place.

She was not yet convinced, however, by the evidence for Espejo. "It is an interesting comparison. I see a few hills that could replicate that, but I am not sure," she said.

She pointed out a new location did not rule out the theory that The Falling Soldier might have been shot by a sniper - who could have been active on a dormant front. "We are still left with an extraordinary photograph," she added.

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