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© Tony Cenicola/The New York Times, cardboard box containing negatives of Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa.

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Featured in the New York Times is an interesting article, The Capa Cache, on Robert Capa and what has become known as the “Mexican Suitcase,” which is actually three cardboard boxes containing thousands of previously lost negatives he made during the Spanish Civil War. Considered one of the most important and influential photographers of war and conflict, the work was thought to have been lost when Capa left Paris and the contents of his darkroom behind during the Nazi invasion in 1939. But then in 1995, the work resurfaced and after several years of legal negotiations, the lost negatives are being transferred to the International Center of Photography in New York, which was founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell.

© Estate of Robert Capa, contact sheet of negatives made during the Spanish Civil War (left) and Falling Soldier, near Córdoba, Spain, 1936.

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The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause. – from the New York Times article, The Capa Cache, by Randy Kennedy.