We all know well Robert Capa’s photograph portraying the Spanish civil war militiaman as he falls, arms open, hit by a bullet, but nobody has ever seen his body and it has also been discovered that there is no piece of paper that certifies his death. For a long time this image of a man collapsing into death was a propagandistic symbol against the Francoist tyranny and most importantly it opened historiographic polemics: if the photograph were a fake? After all these years, we are able to claim that the photo is authentic and we can even reveal the dead man’s identity.
The Barbican Centre of London is responsible for confirming this authenticity and through an exhibition it is trying to wipe away definitely all the suspects that have been suggested in the last years about it being a fabricated photo. 
The exhibition, entitled “This Is War! Robert Capa at Work Gerda Taro – On the Subject of War” (17th October 2008 to 25th January 2009), will revolve around about forty snapshots taken by Capa and his partner Gerda Taro on that 4th September 1936 when in Cerro Muriano in Andalusia the twenty-four-year-old militiaman Federico Borrell Garcia was immortalized right in the moment when he was falling backwards as he dropped his rifle after being hit by a hostile bullet. The images have been recovered recently at the International Centre of Photography of New York.
Once they are placed in chronological order, it is possible to analyse with great preciseness what happened: Capa was taking photos of a simulated battle scene when a hostile machine-gun suddenly started to splutter. Therefore, those emphatic captions that talk about a soldier “hit at the high point of a battle” are completely wrong, but that day the young Federico Borrell Garcia really died. So the photographer cannot be accused of setting up a historical fake for propagandistic purposes, in order to support the antifascist republicans.
As the curator of the exhibition, Cynthia Young, said: “The photos and the studies that have been carried out confirm that the photo is authentic”.
The first to denounce the photograph as a fake  was an English journalist, Phillip Knightley, with his book thirty-three years ago, in which he wrote that Capa was actually following the Northern Spanish Francoist forces on the day that the militiaman Borrell Garcia would have died. The artist’s biographer, Richard Whelan, concluded after thorough studies that Capa was never involved with the Francoists and on the 5th September 1936 he actually was in Cerro Muriano.
Aside from every critical analysis, the photo “Falling Soldier”, that Phillip Knightley continues to consider a propagandistic act despite the new research carried out, travelled the world after its publication on Life magazine.
The exhibition organized by the Barbican Centre is also an excellent chance to find out about the Spanish Civil War, the first war to be fought with the weapons of propaganda, culture and photography, since dozens of great European and American intellectuals signed up for the republican army, and thousands of them embraced the cause during the years between 1936 and 1939. Among them, two photographers, destined to show the world the horrifying images of the nationalist advance in Spain. They were Robert Capa and Gerda Taro who arrived together in the Iberian peninsula on the 5th August 1936, less than a month after the war had begun.  
As we have already mentioned the event “This Is War! Robert Capa at Work Gerda Taro – On the Subject of War”  opens with the Spanish Civil War and the extraordinarily famous photo of the militiaman who was shot dead, together with other images that testify its authenticity. These are followed by a section dedicated to the great Hungarian photographer, known as one of the greatest reporters in the history of photography. The itinerary ends with a retrospective dedicated to Capa’s partner. It is not easy to tell Gerda Taro’s photos from Robert Capa’s. They went through the war almost always side by side and sometimes with the same model of camera. However, in the woman’s photographs we can identify the choice to decentralize the subject, to frame it foreshortened and never frontally, to leave room for the sky. Despite being less famous than her partner, her images are just as strong and artistically powerful. (translated by Giorgina Arcuri)