According to Robert Hughes, author of “The Shock of the New”
(1980), during World War I’s nation-shattering and culture-
shredding carnage, no photograph of a dead soldier appeared in a
German, French or British newspaper. But the Sept. 23, 1936,
issue of the French magazine Vu published (as did Life magazine
10 months later) what became perhaps the century’s iconic
photograph — “Falling Soldier.” It was taken by, and launched
the remarkable career of, a 22-year-old Hungarian refugee from
fascism, photographer Robert Capa. It shows a single figure, a
loyalist — that is, anti-fascist — soldier, supposedly at the
instant of death from a bullet fired by one of Franco’s
soldiers. The soldier is falling backward on a hillside, arms
outstretched, his rifle being flung from his right hand. This
was, surely, stunning testimony to photography’s consciousness-
raising and history-shaping truth-telling, the camera’s
indisputable accuracy, its irreducibly factual rendering of
reality, its refutation of epistemological pess