Recent reports have cast doubt - or perhaps that should be further doubt - on the authenticity of Robert Capa's famous picture from the Spanish Civil War, of a man falling back as he is shot, his rifle about to drop from his hand. In today's Observer Euan Ferguson asks whether it matters if the incident was staged and the photograph therefore faked, and he argues that it does matter.
I agree. Not only that, but I lack the imagination to understand how anyone could think it didn't. If you scroll to the bottom of this report, you'll find an opinion to the contrary from Richard Whelan. But I would say for my part that faking the picture (if that is indeed what happened) matters in two ways. It's a piece of professional dishonesty - not exactly like academic plagiarism but of comparable seriousness; and it presents as an incident that actually happened something that didn't, and therefore sells a deliberate untruth. On the other side what can be said? Even the claim that it was in pursuit of a just cause seems dubious. That it was done for the cause of Republican Spain in the fight against Franco won't by itself establish that that fight needed this photograph, or that this photograph made an appreciable difference to the outcome. Whether or not there are justifiable lies, it is hard to see how Capa's picture could have been one.