It’s a rare picture that encompasses an era; even the most justly
famous photographs very rarely manage the feat. Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day
in Times Square,” for instance, perfectly illustrated the rapturous mood
of a nation - and much of the world - at the end of the Second World
War, but no one would argue that the image somehow captured the
five-year war itself. Bill Eppridge’s haunting picture of Robert
Kennedy’s assassination in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen in June 1968
distilled the darkest, most murderous currents of the Age of Aquarius,
but no one says of that one photograph, “
That was the Sixties.”
So, yes, it’s phenomenally rare for a single photo to evoke both a
discrete moment, and an entire epoch. But that is exactly what Robert
Capa’s now-iconic “Falling Soldier” manages to do; there, in one frame,
made at the very moment a Loyalist fighter in Spain is shot and killed,
one encounters a distillation of the Fascist violence and the brutally
extinguished Republican sense of hope - hope for a new, free,
egalitarian society - that ultimately came to define the Spanish Civil
War...
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