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But Mr. Susperregui challenges that notion too, saying it “has to be entirely dismissed.” Not only were the front lines of the opposing sides too widely separated and “the aim of gunnery too inexact” to make that hypothesis feasible, he said, but “there is no documentary reference, neither written nor visual, about the use of snipers” on the Córdoba front.
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José Manuel Susperregui, a Spanish professor, asserts that Capa staged his famous photo.
The renewed debate about “Falling Soldier” coincides with the opening of an exhibition, previously shown in New York and London, of nearly 300 of Capa and Taro’s photographs and notes at the Catalan National Museum of Art in Barcelona. The wounds of the Civil War have not yet completely healed in Spain, and the country’s Socialist government has felt compelled to defend the photograph, still a symbolic image for the left, which lost the war to Gen. Francisco Franco, against accusations that it was staged.
“Art is always manipulation, from the moment you point a camera in one direction and not another,” Spain’s culture minister, the film director and screenwriter Ángeles González-Sinde, said after visiting the exposition last month. Even if the new controversy proves that the photograph is something other than what Capa and his admirers have always claimed it to be, she suggested, that does not detract from Capa’s genius.
The first sustained challenge to the authenticity of “Falling Soldier” came in the mid-1970s, in Philip Knightley’s book “The First Casualty.” But the tentative identification 20 years later of the dying militiaman as an anarchist named Federico Borrell, known to have died at Cerro Muriano on Sept. 5, 1936, seemed to quell that controversy.
Mr. Susperregui, however, visited the Cerro Muriano site and notes that it is “a wooded area, with century-old trees,” not at all like the open hillside shown in Capa’s photograph. His book also refers to an article published in 1937 in an obscure anarchist magazine as a tribute to Federico Borrell, in which a fellow combatant describes Borrell as firing “from behind a tree” when he was killed and adds that “I can still see him stretched out behind the tree that served as his barricade, with his unruly hair falling over his face and a trickle of blood dripping from his mouth.”
In 1996 Magnum Photos, the agency that Mr. Capa helped found and which was run for many years by his brother Cornell, issued a statement contending that the naming of Mr. Borrell proved beyond any doubt that the “Falling Soldier” photograph was genuine. Magnum did not respond to requests for an interview about Mr. Susperregui’s findings.
In the book Mr. Susperregui also dwells on what he regards as other contradictions in the received account. He notes, for example, that Capa spoke in various interviews of the militiaman being felled by a burst of machine-gun fire, not a sniper’s bullet, and that the photographer also offered widely varying accounts of the vantage point and technique he employed to obtain the “Falling Soldier” photograph and another, almost identical image shortly afterward.
The truth of the matter, the photography center’s Mr. Hartshorn said, is that “it’s like a detective story, the crux and core of which is that we don’t know.
“There is enormous speculation,” he added, “but there is very little to hang your hat on and say, ‘This is what we know.’ There are just too many moving parts and pieces that you can’t verify or prove.”