The Falling Soldier has been famous for numerous reasons at numerous times. However, it’s most famous for what it captures, the photographer captured the precise moment a bullet fatally struck a Spanish Loyalist militiaman.
While it’s debatable whether it was real as it was common to stage these sorts of pictures then, the picture got famous despite the allegations. The soldier being captured is collapsing backwards, after being fatally shot in the head. He dressed in civilian-looking clothing but put on a leather cartridge belt, and his rifle can be seen slipping out of his right hand. The photo was taken by Robert Capa, a Jewish Hungarian photographer.
CAPA worked in Spain, photographing the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. This picture however is said to have been taken on September 5, 1936. While it was initially believed to show the death of a Republican, it was debunked as the man captured was identified to be the anarchist militiaman Federico Borrell García.
The title of the photograph is “Loyalist militiaman at the moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936”. However, the photograph was taken in the village of Espejo and not Cerro Muriano.
While Robert Capa and Gerda Taro tried to get to the Córdoba front, the Nationalist Breguet bombers began to attack government troops that camped in the hills near the copper-mining village of Cerro Muriano, just north of Córdoba on September 5th.
Before noon, the rebel forces had attacked the village and the Loyalist encampment, leaving it in an uproar. The rebel forces left and returned the next day to continue their attack and send the government troops back.
The photographers, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, eventually left for the southwest of Montoro when they could not take any pictures. They reached the camp of a small part of the CNT militia outside the farming village of Espejo.
They were willing to pose for the photographers and did it happily. Eventually, one of the photographers asked them if they could imitate being hit by a bullet. One soldier volunteered but just as Robert Capa was taking the shot, the man’s legs went slack, his hands limp; with his rifle flying away from his loosened fingers, and he dropped dead just as the shutter of the camera clicked.
The picture was published in the September 23, 1936, issue of the French magazine “Vu” and eventually by Life.
