The Falling Soldier / Cerro Muriano, Córdoba front, Spain, September 5, 1936

The republican soldier Federico Borrell García falls to the ground, hit by an enemy bullet, at the precise moment Robert Capa was about to create a heroic portrait of him. This is the most famous wartime photograph ever taken. For the first time in history, a photographer captured the moment of a person’s death. Its publication in various magazines (first in the French magazine Vu and then in the American Life in 1937) made this photo an icon of the Spanish civil war and a key image of photojournalism. However, the moment captured is so extreme that doubts about the veracity of the photograph have frequently been expressed from various quarters. Some people claim the picture was staged, a frontal attack on the ethics of modern photojournalism, which views staging news events as a capital offence. What is certain is that Capa became intimately involved in wartime settings with his Leica, a fast 35-mm camera. His famous reports include photographs of the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944. War also ended his life prematurely: he stepped on a mine in Indochina in 1954.