NEW YORK — When he died in a land-mine explosion in Indochina in 1954, Robert Capa went from journalistic celebrity to instant legend. Now, a veil of mystery cloaking the patron saint of war photographers has been lifted, with the recovery of thousands of Capa negatives from the Spanish civil war where he had first made his name 18 years earlier.
Three cardboard boxes filled with rolls of black-and-white film — perhaps as many as 4,000 negatives — were recently delivered to the International Center of Photography, a New York-based photography museum and archive founded and directed by Cornell Capa, Robert’s younger brother.
ICP curator Brian Wallis said the cache of negatives, believed for decades to have been lost, may answer many questions about Capa’s life and work during the 1936-39 struggle for Spain, in which fascist forces under Gen. Francisco Franco ultimately defeated the Republican loyalists and their international supporters.
First among these questions, he said, is whether Capa’s famous “falling man” picture — showing a Republican militiaman at the apparent moment he was hit by a fatal bullet — was possibly faked, or whether Capa was even the photographer who made it.
The picture, taken during battle in September 1936, the third month of the war, has stirred conspiracy theories for years, with critics calling it too perfect not to have been staged — especially in an era when the setting up and posing of action photos was not the journalistic taboo it is today — and because the whereabouts of the original negative are unknown.
Wallis said he agrees with late Capa biographer Richard Whelan that the picture is authentic, and the proof may lie somewhere on a still-unexamined roll of film in the collection.
“We don’t know yet if the negative of that picture is here, but if it is, the series of frames will clarify the sequence of events — we will be able to see what happened just before and just after the photo was taken,” he said.
It would also confirm whether it actually came from Capa’s camera or someone else’s.
In fact, Wallis said, the archive’s significance lies largely in revealing how Capa and two other photographers whose negatives are included in the collection did their work, depicting events in sequence, each picture related to those on either side of it.
He said Capa was one of the inventors of the photo essay, a series of still photos of an event over time, which were immensely popular in weekly photo magazines that proliferated in European cities in the 1930s, building up to the ultimate version — America’s Life magazine, for which Capa later worked.
The files had been missing since 1939, when Capa, then 25, fled Paris for the United States. In his haste to depart, Capa left the film and other contents of his Paris office and darkroom in the care of a lab assistant, Imre Weisz, who also was preparing to escape.
Hoping to reach Mexico as a refugee, Weisz fled with the boxes of negatives to Marseilles, where he gave the collection to Aguilar Gonzalez, a Mexican consular official and former general, for safekeeping.
The aide wound up as a war prisoner, and the film was thought to be lost.
But in the mid-1990s, the huge cache of negatives was rediscovered in Mexico City, owned by relatives of Gonzalez, who recently gave the archive to the Capa estate through his brother Cornell, now 89 and director emeritus of the photo center he founded.
The major portion of the photos, in tight rolls of 35mm film from Capa’s Leica camera, remain to be examined and cataloged.
