A Missing 6x6 Negative Points to Gerda Taro as the True Photographer of 'The Falling Soldier'

Ninety years of photographic history rests on the dimensions of a single missing piece of celluloid—specifically, a 6-by-6-centimeter square. That is the exact format of a medium-format Reflex-Korelle camera, and according to new research presented this month, it is the camera that actually captured "The Falling Soldier." For nine decades, the September 1936 image of a Republican militiaman collapsing backward on a Spanish hillside has been credited to Robert Capa, anchoring his reputation as the premier combat photographer of the 20th century. But if the original negative was indeed square, the person looking through the viewfinder was almost certainly his partner, Gerda Taro. It turns out the founding myth of modern photojournalism might just have the wrong byline.[1][4]

The renewed scrutiny comes from Fernando Penco Valenzuela, a Spanish historian and archaeologist based in Córdoba who has spent years studying the Capa archive. Penco points to a 2025 retrospective curated by Magnum—the agency Capa co-founded in 1947—which acknowledged that while some surviving prints of the photograph are rectangular, the dimensions of others strongly suggest the missing negative came from a 6x6 camera. On that particular day in 1936, Capa was shooting with a 35mm Leica, which produces rectangular frames. Taro was carrying the Reflex-Korelle.[1][2]

Penco has located earlier photographs from that same afternoon showing Taro holding the square-format camera in Villa del Río, before the pair headed to the front. Furthermore, all other square-format photos that exist from the sequence that day have already been attributed to Taro. “How is it possible that she didn't take the photo?” Penco told the Guardian. “I have no doubt about it whatsoever.”[1][2]

The attribution debate coincides with a broader cultural reassessment of Taro, who was killed by a reversing tank at the Battle of Brunete in July 1937 at just 26 years old. This week, the Venice Film Festival premiered The Girl with the Leica, a biopic directed by Alina Marazzi that attempts to pull Taro out of Capa's shadow. The film frames Taro not as a tragic muse, but as a fiercely independent anti-fascist who recognized the camera as a political weapon. “She was one of the first women to take pictures from the battlefront, but she also captured the consequences the war had for ordinary people, for women and for children,” Marazzi said at the premiere.[2][3]

The confusion over the byline is partly by design. "Robert Capa" was originally a joint fiction. Taro, born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart, and Capa, born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, were Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Paris in the mid-1930s. Together, they invented the persona of a wealthy, seasoned American photographer to command higher fees from magazines. Early in the Spanish Civil War, both shot under the Capa name, making historical attribution a notoriously messy business.[2][5]

Penco's findings also reinforce the long-standing suspicion that "The Falling Soldier" was a staged composition rather than a spontaneous combat casualty. In 2009, researchers concluded the photograph was taken near Espejo, roughly 30 miles away from the Battle of Cerro Muriano where Capa originally claimed it was shot. “As there was no fighting in the area when it was taken, in my opinion the photo was staged,” Penco noted. Yet, staged or not, the image's impact on public perception of the conflict was seismic when it ran in Life magazine in July 1937.[1][2]

Despite the mounting circumstantial evidence, the International Center of Photography in New York, which holds the Capa archive, has not officially changed the attribution. Its live object record still lists the photograph under Robert Capa's name, dating it cautiously to "early September 1936." Without the physical negative—which has been lost for decades—a definitive reattribution remains technically impossible, leaving the 6x6 theory as a highly credible hypothesis rather than an absolute proof.[4]

The institutional caution highlights the difficulty of untangling a shared legacy built on a shared pseudonym. The International Center of Photography has not yet amended its official catalog, and without the physical negative, it may never do so. But the burden of proof has quietly inverted: historians are no longer asking if Gerda Taro could have taken the photograph, but how Endre Friedmann possibly could have.[1][4]