Thinking Sideways: The Falling Soldier

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code sideways. Thinking Sideways podcast is also brought to you by the audiobook Condition of the Wife between Us by Grea Hendrix and Sarah Peckin. In Yes, you now hear the story. Listeners are calling wow, just wow, and one of the best audio books ever. Here's what the New York Times book review said, quote A friendlessly smart cat and masks thriller. Unquote it sounds like something I might just read myself, or better still, I'll pick up the audiobook and listen to it. Uh. It is a narrated

by Julia Whalen. It's twisty psychological suspense about a jealous wife. But it's not what you think it is. So start listening now. I McMillan audio dot com slash wife between us. It's quickly start working. Well, hey there, and welcome again to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I am Steve, joined as usual by Devin and Joe were and this week,

once again, we're going to talk about a mystery. But as I said last week, we are not going to talk about the same kind of mystery that we've been talking about for several weeks in a row, which is the gory grossky. Yeah, we're going to do that thing that we do because we're a podcast about unsolved mystery is not true crime, and talk about something that's like a mystery that is totally not gory. It does involve somebody getting shot to death. There's no crime. This no mystery. No,

the only thing there is the mystery. Okay, alright, Actually, if it depends on who you ask. I mean, as some people consider the entire Spanish Civil War to be a huge crime, that's true. That's true. Okay, Well listen, here's here's the deal is. Today's mystery is entirely centered around the authenticity of a photograph that is commonly known

as the Falling Soldier. And this photo, which you've probably seen, was taken in ninety six and shows a Republican soldier during the Spanish Civil War who's in midfall after supposedly having been shot and killed. And here's the thing is, I had never ever seen this photo. I don't think I had supposedly like one of the most famous war photos ever taken. Great, here's but here's what I'm telling you, as as a sovereign human, is that I genuinely never

seen this photo before. And if you have not, if you are like Devin, stop now look up. Go look up the Falling Soldier by Robert Kappa, or check out our website Thinking podcast dot com. There will be a picture right there too. So let's let's give you the mystery here let's give you a little description. So our soldier. He's wearing a white shirt, he's got light colored pants on.

He's got this really distinct set of ammunition bags with suspenders holding them up on his shoulders, and he's falling backwards his knees your and his right arm is fully outstretched. He's got a rifle in his hand, it's almost dropping or flinging it away from himself, but his body is twisting to the left, away from where the photographer is. Did the rifle have a bayonet on it? Okay, no it did not, But he is turning away. That's not a stupid question. Yeah, that was a thing during that time.

It still is. Technically you don't fix for the charge. Yeah, but no, he's he's twisting away and his head is turned also to the left, away from the photographer. And people say that he has just either been shot in the chest or shot in the head, and that this photo has literally captured him in the moment that he dies. So that's that's what really gets everybody up, is like, this is such an amazingly it's such an amazing capture

my photographer, and captured an extremely random way. Also, yeah, that you've heard the story about well, yeah, well we'll talk about that shortly. Um, I want to tell everybody who took the photo of first, it was taken by a photo actually very very famous now today, well known photographer and beginning then he was a beginning photo journalists. Yeah, he just started out. And that's a guy by the

name of Robert Kappa. And to this day, though people say, listen, Kappa really did take that photo in the conditions he said, or no, that photo was a fake and it's not real, even though as Joe said, it's considered one of the best photos from a war. Fake. I know your mind are going, I think it's been photoshop. Just this guy pretended to get shot, right, he would actually get killed

in the circumstances that are described surrounding this. Yeah, photo shop, weird ai monster, none of those, none of those two, none of that maybe but probably Okay, okay, So let's start at the beginning here. Let me give you a little bit about Robert Kappa, and then we'll move into the situation that leads him to be where he was to take the photo. Kappa was originally he was born

with the name Andre Friedman. He was born in Budapest nine and he was Jewish, and that would be something that would push him across Europe and eventually to the New World, to the America's based on the political climates in Europe at the time. He left Hungry when he was accused of being a Communist sympathizer, which he would then say, okay, well I gotta get out of here.

Like literally they said, well, they said, listen, if you get out of town in twenty four hours and don't come back to the country, we won't do anything to you. So he had the bad fortunate of choosing Germany. Well, actually, I wouldn't say, you know, as I say that it's not bad bad fortune because that is where he was able to learn and perfect some of his trade, which is photography, and it actually is what launched his career.

I mean. The other option there is right that maybe he like actually was a Nazi and like intentionally moved to Germany and then like later in life was like that was a mistake. No, no, no, he was definitely against what the Nazi stood for, so that is definitely not great. But I'm not sure how many Jews were pro Nazis. Nobody's ever heard from them again, but no,

so he went there. He stayed in Germany for about two years where he learned his his craft, and then he left in nineteen thirty three and he moved to Paris, where the Germans will never never get him. That was the thing about that war, though, right, is that like he could pretty much move almost anywhere in your Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So he gets to he to Germany. He meets a bunch of other immigrants there who are

also become these huge names in photography. But while he's there, he meets this woman and her name is I listened to her name so many times and I know I'm gonna mess it up, and I apologize. It is Gerta pohorl. I believe that's how you say it. And if I again, I apologize, if I if I mispronounced that, Like I said, I listened to it on a documentary a bunch of times and I couldn't. She can't complain. Well, now, that's that's kind of that's heartless. But the point is here

she and Andre Friedman meet. They they begin to they're both photographers. They're trying to sell photos and get jobs, but they're not really making any money, and she comes up with this brilliant scheme. She's the one that kind of makes Robert Kappa because here's what she figures out is that as a Jewish man, he is having a very hard time because there's there's prejudices and people just don't want to pay money for photos from this run

of the middle photo guy anyway. But if they say, and this is what they do, they say, listen, there's actually this very famous photographer named Robert Kappa from America, and he's here and I'm negotiating on his behalf and it would be an insult for you to not pay him X amount for his photos. Well, his photos were good enough, and like, well, we'll go ahead, we'll bring us, bring us to this job. And they got it and they get paid it. I feel like they pull the

whole thing off. I really feel like this like speaks so deeply to me because I have this like deep seated belief that like women by and large are the ones who like hustle. We are the ones who like come up with these amazing like business schemes and really like hustle to make things happen. And oftentimes it's I mean, yeah, but oftentimes it is to you know, build up somebody that you care about, often like a man that you

care about. But regardless, I just like that speaks to me on such a deep level that she was like, no, you know what we should do is just lie about it. At the same time, she reinvented herself though. She changed her name to Gerda Taro at the same time and started pitching her photos as well, and so she was selling stuff. The long story is, or the short version of this though, is that it works. They start making

money their travels, they start getting commissions. One of the things that they do is they realize that there's the civil war starting in Spain and they have this naive idea of they want to capture war on film and show the you know, what's happening to the people and things that you just didn't see because war traditionally was only pictures snapped of like the general's the big wigs talking and having the conferences, and not the guy in

the trench bleeding to death. So why do you classify that as a naive idea because the way I've understood is that it's it's that very young idea of we're going to what it's going to be beautiful and nothing's going to happen, And yeah, I guess that wasn't that doesn't work out in the long run to be a wonderful, beautiful, artistic experience in it becomes very dirty. And that wasn't

necessarily the sense that I had. I mean, they both came from kind of war torn places, and they they understood the idea of feeling like it was important to capture the realities of would be Yeah, I guess it just it feels to me like they were making very

conscious decision to go in. I mean, a lot of journalists do this too right now, where they make this conscious decision to go in because they think it's important that it's not just the generals in their pretty uniforms in their beautiful rooms that they're oak table, right, and that's that everybody should know what war actually looks like.

And you know, again, yes, it's maybe a little naive to assume that bad things won't happen to them, or that it's going to be fun and beautiful, but I think they it's my sense that they had at least a pretty realistic idea of what a war torn place looks like. Personality. Yeah, this is also not a new idea. I mean they've been ever since photography began, people have

been taking pictures. Yeah, a new idea, absolutely, But I didn't think that as a as a war correspondent, you do have the luxury of being able to pop in and take some pictures, it's interview and then leave, you know, which is not something the guys in the trenches get to do. That's that's the really horrible thing about warrible besides getting arms and legs blown off, you know, but it's just living in these awful conditions for weeks months.

But see that was that was eventually that would be the thing that distinguished Robert Kappa so much is that he would pop into a trench or a foxhole, sit there and smoke a cigarette and talk to a guy, a kid who is freaking the f out because he's everything he's called with the day, you know, wwing up all around. He's just having a conversation kids, able to

kind of focus in. Like I've watched documentaries and people like he was amazing, Like this stuff didn't stuff is not the word I wanted to use, But it didn't phase him. He just didn't. He just so he had that kind which is why I kind of had that sense of like they knew what they were getting into. I mean, they hadn't seen a lot of developed nature, and that could be that could again be like a

impression of them. They could have gone into it totally blind and it just happened that they were good at it. They could have been like, this is going to be beautiful and amazing. It's gonna be like woodstock all over again. Okay, so there are there's such a thing. Actually, there's some been some beautiful war photography. It's really huntingly beautiful. So here's so. Like I said, though, let's get back into

this part of the story. At the beginning of what leads up to the Falling Soldier is that they get this commission, and I believe it's View magazine, which is a French magazine. They get a commission, they go to Pain to check out the war, and I'm going to give you the loosest, loosest basic primer on what the Spanish Civil War was. There's tons of information out there, and if you want to dive deep into this do so. It's very interesting, but it's not our total focus here.

But basically the disclaimer here is basically like, this is not a podcast about the Spanish. So the simple, simple version is between the late nineteen teens to the nineteen thirties in Spain, there's a series of political upheavals. The monarchy becomes unpopular and unstable, and things like communism and socialism and right wing fascism start gaining ground. E mentionally, everybody is piste off at everybody else, like it's just

dirty and not good. And there's some unsuccessful coups in the early thirties, and then there is one that goes off literally with a bang, and everybody is at each other's throats and they the country divides into two parties. There's the Republicans, which are called the Popular Front, and the Nationals nationalists, who are the anti communists, and they go at it for I think four yeah, three, about three years is how long the Spanish Civil War lasted.

That is the basic, most basic of that's like not even the Wikipedia intro to the actually the if you want any any reading on it. George Orwell was took part in the war. He was in the trenches. George or Well, the the film director George Well the the writer. Yes, yes, yeah, he wrote yeah, yeah, well yeah, but you wrote a book about about his experiences called Homage to Catalonia, which is a pretty good read. It doesn't and he is it pains to say. He doesn't talk about it completely.

He talks about his corner of the war, the things that he saw, but also tries to explain some of the overarching groups and what they were all about and stuff. And he doesn't claim that he explains the entire thing in total detail. Yeah, it seems almost impossible to do that.

The Spanish Civil War is extremely complicated anywhere, and well, yeah, it's one of the more complicated ones out there because it's the first one where not only is the country fighting itself, but this is where the bigger European powers like the like the uss are, the Communist nation and the Germans and the Americans, like all these different forces are starting to push stuff in. It's it's a testing ground. It would become World War two. There was. Yeah, there

was a lot of a lot of international interference. A lot of people came from far and wide to participate on both sides of the war. Again like or a well, for example, Ernest Hemingway was another one, and there's some of the famous figures you could name. Tons of people fought in that war. And uh, it's also I think unique, or at least the first war really that is totally shrouded in clouds of BS. I mean it's a lot

of there's a lot of BS surrounding this war. That's that really has followed us down to this to the to the present day. Well, and I can't disagree with you because I I really what I wanted to have. As you guys know, I've done this before. I'm going to give you a two and a half to three paragraph description of this war. And as I read it, it just became more and more convoluted. So that's a that is a great description of the problems with explaining

this this conflict. Well, yeah, and I don't mean that the people the war was BS. I just mean a lot of the commentary afterwards, the interpretations that people that put on the war and the people fighting it and everything else are mostly BS. Yeah, and so with that, let's let's move forward. Because I think the one the one pertinent bit of information about the Spanish Civil War is when it began, because that plays into the date of the capture of the image of the falling soldier.

The war began in July ninety six. Okay, we're going to move in. And supposedly the photo the falling Soldier was taken in September. We don't know when in September, but in September of nineteen thirty six. There's some things that can kind of maybe help us figure that out. The first of which is when the photo ran, the original run date of it. Because if you remember, I said, there was View magazine back in Paris, not v Iu. Yeah, it's not like the View like yeah, no, that's a

different show entirely with four women on it. No, they were not there. But now this magazine would run the image along with several of quite a few other of Robert Kappa's images in the September twenty three, nineteen thirty six issue lost the word issue. So he took it at least no later than that morning then and then imediately downloaded it to the internet. There is there is

no internet, there's no editing. He had to hand off undeveloped natives to a pilot who would then fly them back to Paris, where they would go to a dark room, get developed, and then get integrated into the magazine and not going to be at least days. And that's the corroborated that was the process. He didn't ever see his own I mean, he didn't develop on site. No, he didn't.

He did have I think back in Paris he had he did have a dark room, dark room, yeah, but but he was he was still in Spain when he probably taking pictures presumably, right. But so, I mean that's kind of a frustrating little detail in this, right is that. I mean, we've all all everybody in this room at least has shot film with a camera. Film come back well, and and that you like kind of you stick it in your tube and you say, like, I mean, how

much can you say about it? You can't ever go through, especially if you don't have a dark room, right, you don't have the chance to go through and say like frame one, roll one, this is where I took it, frame to roll one. Actually, actually a counter to that is because as you two know, I'm in a photography class right now because I shoot all the time and one of the things that I don't do because digital

makes this so much easier. But this instructor is really really pressing on us, and he is old school, a very old school. Is you have a notebook. You you write down your shot numbers and your exposure time and your ugh stop and stuff like that. Now, as a war photographer, you can't do that because you're just blazing away. But you can stop and write roll to one five to one five, this date, this event, like you can

give the track. It's not like today where you can actually just go to the image and look in the data in there. It is. You're sure that he there was some taking place, but you know this image particularly that we're talking about, and the kind of photography he was doing, we're talking like actual battlefield like bullets flying over your head photography. So I presume that he wasn't also like picture snap okay, note book okay, picture snap notebook. No, I mean you know, you have to kind of take

that back. And so that's something else that I would just add it to the layer layer complexity, like on a role basis the role and then make a note word. And so that's that added complexity of us not actually

having him saying to the publisher this is what I got. Well, and here's the other problem is there's the influence or the input of the publisher of the photos, because at the time that it runs into view, they say that the photo was taken in Cordeoba, Spain, but other people have come along after the fact and said, oh no, that was taken in Sarah Mariano, I believe is how

you pronounced that city's name. Now, that might not sound like a big deal because those two cities are about eight miles or twelve kilometers apart, but if there's a war, that could actually be pretty important. And as we'll find later on, there's even more locations that are suggested where this photo might have been taken. So that draws it out to not eight miles and twelve kilometers, but thirty miles and what is that like eighty kilometers roughly difference.

I mean, this can be huge differences and where the battlefront is. So that also throws, you know, question of was he taking in the serene place or was it somewhere where all hell was breaking loose. For his part, Robert Kappa never really talked about this photo and what the circumstances around it. He's really kind of tight lipped around it, which was weird. Because he was such an outgoing and and very fun and playful man. And you subscribe,

I'll talk about all the few different reasons. Yeah I have. I have some ideas too. But according to him, in one of the few interviews that he did, what he said was, actually, Joe, do you mind reading this? It seems right up your ally, my friend with the Hungarian accident. No, no, just do it, please don't. In fact, quote, I was

there in the trench with about twenty Melicianos. I just kind of put my camera above my head and didn't even look and click the picture when they moved over the trench, and that was all That camera, which I held above my head, just caught a man at the moment when he was shot. That was probably the best picture I ever took. I never saw the picture in

the frame. Cancer camera was far above my head. No, that's that's amazing because what you need to realize is that he's shooting at this time thirty five millimeter film has become available, so that's great because it's highly portable. He's using a like a camera which is more akin to the body a style of a camera you see today. Then the old school boxer Brownie style, so it makes it. It's amazing to think that he held it up and it was as in focus as it was for him.

It's an amazingly lucky shot that which is also white. People question it, well, he probably he probably had a stopped way down, you know what I mean, are just wide open again as much like but that focus ring is the hardest bit. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know if there was a lot of action happening. I don't know as much about photography as either of you do, certainly,

but yeah, we won't develop into nerd talking. It's fine, but I would I just say that, like, you know, if he had focused from the trench on kind of where the front line was happening, and then had to duck down because shooting was happening and was just reaching up, that might account for in my understanding of photography, might account for why it was so in focus. But again, it's pretty lucky. Yeah, it was perfectly in focus. Personally, there the other photos from that series that are in

much better focus. But we'll deal with that shortly. Uh, Let's let's move to after the fact though, So so Kapa takes his shot, he would then eventually leave Spain, because remember this war goes on for years, and he would go. He would bounce back and forth to Spain over the course of that war. Unfortunately, when he left, Gerta didn't want to go. She she got another assignment and she stayed, and that would end up costing her

her life. They if you don't know, you actually, if you've never heard the story, you don't know this is they were lovers. They had a intimate relationship, and when she was killed it took a toll on him. She was in another battle area. She jumped onto a jeep or some kind of vehicle that was moving away and a tank rolled into it. She she didn't die that moment, she died the next day. Even worse ruled right at

the time. I believe that the tank hit it, she was thrown to the ground, and probably the car rolled on top of her because she's writing on the running board of the vehicle. So I have a feeling that she took massive internal injuries which took about a day to kill her. So she is actually considered probably she's considered to be probably the first female photo journalists to

have ever died in a battlefield or war situation. So not the title that you want, but you know she she earned that fairly prestigious and yeah, absolutely not one that you actively aim for. A yes, yeah, at least people are going to look back, look at you and say, wow, what a dumb, ignominious death. You know, she was in there trying to get it. And for his part, Robert Kappa would go on, he would fill or he would photograph every major conflict from then until his death in

nineteen fifty four. He was in he got an assignment for Life magazine to take photographs at the end of the First Indo China War. This is in Vietnam. It's not the actual Vietnam War. The designation for being the Vietnam War takes about another year or so. But he went were there like, yeah, this is where the French were being pushed out and the Vietnam War. It was in Vietnam, Yes, but it's got the designation of the

first and the second Indo China Wars. But the point is he's there, he's taking photos of the troops and at one point he says he's going to go ahead and shoot take photos. Back down the track they're walking, he steps on the landmine and that takes his life, and that is the end of Robert Kappa. The man is well known though. If you've ever seen photos of the Omaha Beach in he's the one who took those photos. He dove off of a boat with all of these marines and soldiers in the thick of it, and he

took photos the whole time. I think he's shot. He shot like a hundred and twenty or a hundred and forty images that day. Only eleven of them survived because unfortunately, when he sent his film to the UK to get developed, a film tech screwed up and destroyed all but those eleven iconic images we haveing, but probably the ones that got destroyed even more. Yes. So, so he's very well known. He is he is the standard of war photography. And if you've, like I said, you've probably seen his work.

He just didn't know who his who he was. Okay, so back to the Falling Soldier. Five years go by, everybody has taken the story of this photo at face value. Nobody has really said, nah, that can't be right. Well, I mean, you know it was the time. Yeah, no, it makes total sense. But uh, then in the seventies a book comes out and somebody says, I don't I don't know if I think that's really real, but we

don't have anything to corroborate it. And then an amazing thing happens, which is remember we said he fled, he left Paris because the Nazis were coming. When he did, he left his dark room. He left all of his film and his negatives there, and he had a suitcase with three boxes of of developed film in those boxes. Somehow, through some series of events, that suitcase made its way

into a diplomat's hands. That diplomat took the suitcase to Mexico, where it lived for the next seventies some years, until such time as a bargain was struck and that film was brought forward and given to the Kappa Estate and Magnum Photos, and Magnum is the company that he helped start with three other a well known photographers back in the that would have been in the thirties that he

did that. But they developed all of the they created prints off of all of that that cellulos, and it was amazing that it was still viable because if you remember, film degrades over time day, so it was amazing that the stuff was in really good shape, and they got a whole bunch of images from his time in Spain. The image of the falling soldiers not in that set, but what is in there is some other images that he took at the same time, and it helps maybe a timeline of where he was and what was going

on when that particular photo was shot. Thus, even more questions are asked now. It was amazing is that not only were his photos found in that suitcase, Gerda's photos, some of hers were also found. And a man by the name of David Seymour who had a really colorful nickname that I've forgot but I can't remember his name. I loved his nickname, I've forgotten it. But they all these lost images of theirs from that war were found,

which is wonderful. But now what we're left with is we have more information, we have more images, but it's an incomplete record. And the question here is was the falling Man truly taken in a conflict or was it not? And it was a staged image. That's what we're going to talk about now that we're in theories. But first let's take a quick break. Hey, Hulu has got a new original series coming out. It's called The Looming Towers, based on the Pula Surprise winning book by Lawrence Right.

Uh it is about guess what all the events leading up to the Night eleven attacks. The series on of the traces, the rising thread of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and now the rivalry and the bureaucratic infighting between the FBI and the CIA might have prevented us from actually heading off those attacks. The Living Tower stars Jeff Daniels, I'm sure you heard of him, also Peter stars Guard and Tahar Rahim and uh So The Living Tower is available now but only on Hulu. Go watching,

click and we're back. Shim it was Shim, Yes, it was Shim, Thank you, thank you. So now that we know who it is, let's get into the first theory. I took all half hour of our break to google that. Oh okay, so here we've actually got really three basic theories. The first theory is that the photograph is authentic in the sense that it is as they said it was taken. The Yeah, like, there is no story around the whole thing, and it is somebody being killed or at the moment

of death from being shot with a bullet. It's not that outlandis said. You go to a war zone and you managed to get a picture of somebody getting shot. It happens a lot. I bet it does. Sorry, people getting shot in war zones happens a lot. Yes, pictures

of people getting shot in war zones is harder. Yeah, okay, So if we go, if we if we follow this sery though, Kappa's biographers and the guys at Magnum Photos, which again, like I said earlier, was a company he founded, they all say that the photo is the real deal. And there's a man by the name of Richard Whalen. I believe Whalen is still alive, but I swore I saw something that said he actually passed away within the last two or three years. But he was a biographer

of Kappa. And what Whaland did? This was back as this was like around two thousand, before the suitcase of image had been found. Now, lets see the guy that wrote the articles, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, same guy. Pobs stopped putting your articles on black backgrounds, but he enlisted the help of a homicide detective. Just kidding. No, it's like it. No, it wasn't Hotel. I can't remember the guy's name. Is

it in here, We'll find it. But the point is this detective said, yeah, sure, I'll look at the photo. That's cool. I've seen a lot of things in my line of work as a homicide detective. And what he noticed, and he pointed out, was in the image the soldiers left hand is barely visible. Now, Remember, I said, the man is twisting and fall he's falling backwards, and he's twisting to his left away from the photographer, and his left hand is barely visible. His legs are bent, and

that hand you can see it dropping below his left thigh. Well, the fingers on that hand are curling that They're curling inwards, and not in a relaxed way, not like making a fist kind of correct, They're just kind of loose like you you know, when you fall asleep and you wake up in your hand is just kind of loosely curled

when you shake your hands out. Yeah, something just like that. Okay, Well, he said, Listen, most people, when they are falling backwards intentionally they cannot help but reflexively put their hand out to break their fall or or accidentally falling backwards. Anybody who is aware of the fact that they are pulling backwards. It's an automatic reaction. But when you are shot or well, actually more importantly, when you are deceased, the tension in your muscles and your your whole body go out and

the hands automatically curl inward. And he keyed in on that saying, listen, I think the guy is actually dead already as he's falling to the ground, and this is a symptom of it, that his hand is curling in on itself. Okay, that that makes total sense, But I have a total issue with it because I'm still struggling with the photo sequence, which we're going to talk about some more soon. Another another issue is the lack of

a bullet hole anywhere. Well, they say that he shot in the head, and remember I said that if you look at this photo, his left the basically the left side of his head, you can't really see it in the image. I suppose actually, if he was really shot, if he was sort of shot in the left side of the head, that would explain why he's twisting twisting

in that direction. Yeah, yeah, that totally like he could have been shot in the heart and twisting that his white shirt would not show blood yet because if he is just the moment of impact and he is initially twisting that that flow of blood from everything being cut by the bullet is not going to show up. He could have been shot left back side of his head too, through his because he has black hair, right, so it

could have been shot in his head. Sorry, I'm going away from Mica and its head just like you know, flung with the velocity of to the right, because I mean, there's a lot of ways that this bullet could have impacted him to kill him and make his body turn in the method that it did. Now. The the other thing that they are pointing to Magnum and Mr Whalen has also pointed out was he was looking at the timing of the photograph that of the falling Soldier and

when it was released. There's a guy, he's a contemporary Robert Kappa. His name is Hans Nameth Uh and Nameth was in Spain at the same time as Kappa doing the same thing, doing war journalism. And by the way, you also this is another one I'm name dropping again. This is also a photographer you know, you know who Jackson Pollock is. He's the drip artist from the fifties

the famous guy. There's iconic photos of Jackson Pollock at work, and those photos were taken by Hans name it, so you actually know his work as well, even if you

didn't realize it, you probably you're right. I forget. I spent so many years in school in the arts that I forget sometimes that not everybody's yeah, like they're just I instantly have that like, oh, yeah, I know who that is, even before I pulled up the image and who it was, and you know that image, Yes, we knew that image of him bent over the canvas on the floor. Okay. Hans Nameth was near a village this is you know in the in September of thirty six,

early September of thirty six. He's in the village of Sarah Mariano when the fighting broke out on the fifth and the sixth September, and he took a bunch of photographs of the local villagers fleeing that violence, and he went on record said, now, I never saw Robert Kappa or Gerda at any time while I was there, And yet images of those same fleeing villagers were run along with the image of the falling soldier in View magazine.

So it says, wait, Robert Cappa was there, and everybody said the image of the falling Soldier was shot was taken on the fifth or the sixth, because that was

when the conflict happened at that location. So that along with the last thing that Richard Wayland found, which is that the original prints that they dug up, you know, Kappa's prints, they were all they were sequentially numbered, that's the from when they were originally developed, and the numbers on the back of the falling Soldier print is prior to the Fleeing Villager p So they're saying, listen, he

was there. You can we know he was there because other photographers have the same people in their images in their their photographs, and this is sequential numbering, is showing that this had to have all been done prior to those villagers images being captured. So that's that's a timeline

that they've established using those those bits of information. The really cynical part of me says, yeah, that film was there somebody else, I mean, like you know, who knows who had a camera and was willing to sell Robert Kappa some film. Actually, I don't think Kappa bought anybody. I don't actually think that. But there you actually bring

up a very interesting point. This is a theory that I didn't have in here, but we'll just toss this out there as a also floating theory, which is that Robert Robert Kappa didn't take the photo, but you know who did because they had made a moniker I think it was Kappa and taro is is the translation of it. They had stamps made up like that was just their brand. They worked so closely together that there's questions of some

of those early photos of which one took them. Now, he had a very distinct style, but if you are taking photographs with someone all the time and you were reviewing your work together, you tend to just naturally pick h if you're co developing a style. I mean, they're co developing a brand, absolutely right, you know. And so maybe and that's one of those things too where it's kind of like she was the first woman to die on a battlefield as a photojournalist, Like maybe her legacy

is even broader than we necessarily know. If it is true that she took these pictures, but that they just thought it would say, because again it's the era. This is not me being sexist. This is the Arab being I mean, yeah, it's not just the era did It's not just the era being sexist, it's the era being super racist because obviously he wasn't even selling photos as a Jew in that time either. He had to change

his entire identity. Yeah, he had to change his own identity, let alone her having to also change all her identities to that. But do you know if Gerda was even there that day? So she yes, she was there with Kappa. They traveled together. They apparently were inseparable when they were in Spain. So the information that I have found, it wasn't as if they said, hey, I'm gonna go here and you go there and let's meet up next week in this other town. No, they went everywhere together. Um,

I think it was Hans name. It was talking about the fact like they ran out of cover at one point to watch a plane that had been shot down spiraling, and he was it was him or somebody else, just talking about like their general level of almost naivete about like oh this and that, and we're going to do this with our photos and like this just this general I mean would but remember he is a very very young man at this time, he is like twenty eighteen

or twenty something like that. He's a very young guy. He was born in nineteen eighteen. This has happening. Yeah, he's eighteen years old. Again, I would call that boldness not necessary, brazenness not necessarily like the immortality kind of thing. Yeah, there's some of that, but there's also that sort of like this again just you know, knowing kind of what we know from like later interviews and things like that, of him thinking that he probably did think. It wasn't

just like I could never die. It was like this is important and I should capture it, you know, And so that's I mean, that's hard. But he had this the is motto was amazing and fortunately it may have also been would cost him his life, which is if your photos aren't good enough, you're not close enough. Yeah. So that's why I don't think like Naveta. I think just like this, like I'm you know, you know, bracing

this whatever we want to call it. But you know, I mean sometimes people are just obsessive about certain yeah, which is also fine, makes them sort of have a

little bit of disregard for their safety. I was listening to uh interview with the NPR correspondent recently, and she said, you know, the really interesting thing about being a war correspondent is that I have this really bad behavior which is like kind of self destructive, and that it's like I go to Iran during the war and report on it while there's bombs dropping around me, and then I get a reward, which is an actual broadcasting award, and

people are rewarding me for this. So my learned behavior is me doing this really dangerous, horrible thing is what makes me really good at my job. And I think that you know, that's kind of feeds into that as well. Absolutely. Yeah. And and you know the thing about war too, is that most of the bullets miss. Yeah, so your odds are actually most of them are as they do. Odds are you can run out there in the battlefield, you won't get shot. But I mean, I guess, I don't know.

I mean, I I would agree, I don't know. I guess. We were kind of talking about my stupid theory that like, well, maybe he didn't actually take the pictures. I think he probably did. I just was kind of throwing that out there. I think that Robert Kappa took the photo and based on things that we're going to talk about. Sadly, I am very conflicted now because I think that he took the photo, but I think the circumstances are not what they were said to be, and we should probably talk

about I think that's our second theory. I think it's okay to say either he or Greta definitely took the picture. Greta sorry, her original name was Greta, but she changed it to Grida anyway, Sorry. I think it's safe for us. Yeah, I think it's safe for us to say somebody that owned that brand took the picture. Okay, we'll go with that. So let's go the theory number two, which is indeed that the photo is a fake, and by fake, I mean it is not what it is portrayed. It was staged.

So the process of faking photos, as Joe said, you know, I mean the process of taking photos of war, that happened as soon as people figured out how to take photographs, and right after that they figured out how to fake photos to get what the the to tell the story that they wanted to tell. They would manipulate the image in such a way so that it told their story and and it didn't matter what else how well it happens,

you know. I mean it's like, for example, but imagine you're out in the battlefield and you see something really some really cool thing you've never seen before, like somebody getting shot and falling down to the ground. You think that's not cool obviously, but that would make a great shot. Unfortunately you didn't capture that shot. And so and it's a huge timing thing. If you want to catch somebody right in the act of getting shot, that's a big thing.

And so I could see where at a certain point you would kind of give up on trying to actually capture that moment and just asking some soldiers slipping a few pace thos and say, dude, would you fall to the ground just like and and and and in a work correspondents mine, it's actually if he does it in such a way that it looks just like all these other guys that you've seen getting shot getting shot, it's like, hey, you know, I recreated the moment, you know, I wasn't

able to capture it. And the act of staging photos was what a lot of photographers were forced to do during the Spanish Civil Wars, specifically because of the fact that the photographers were not allowed onto the front line, which makes sense, Yes they're not allowed, or else it's a timing thing. Like I said, So here's here's the crux,

or here's the basis of the information. That really is throwing this theory forward at this point for a lot of people is that while Robert Kappa was in Sarah Mariano, he did take photos of refugees. Those refugees we talked about that Hans had gotten photos of, but at that point he had not yet taken the photo of the falling soldier. So basically the photos were out of order.

When the print house developed them, they put them in the incorrect order, and instead he took that image a day or more later at it several days later at an entirely different location in a village called Espejo, which is about thirty miles or fifty kilometers south of where he supposedly was. And at that point when they got to that town, there was literally nothing happening because they had been you know, they on the fifth and the sixth,

they were there, there's all this action. They say, we're going to go somewhere else, and they get to that somewhere else, which is a spago according to this theory, and nothing's going on. And at this point they say, well listen, we're bored. Um. They talked the local soldiers into running some maneuvers for them, because hey, you'll get your photo taken. And this is this is the days we're getting your photo taken. It's still a novel thing.

So they run these exercises and if you look at the photos, there's images of the photographer, whoever the photographer is, whether it's Kappa or Taro, are in the trench and the soldiers are jumping over the trench and then they're bending over this this mound of dirt quote unquote firing at the enemy. They're running, they're doing all of these maneuvers and the action role playing, and they may have

been doing that for the benefit of the camera. And at one point they said, hey, you know what, like Joe said, do you mind just running and getting quote unquote getting shot? Yeah, it's what soldiers like there and another soldiers going in Spanish, yes, yes, pew in Spanish. Whatever. That Okay, Well, but here's the thing is that if we look at the images that are taken at the same time as the falling soldier. There's some damning images because there's an image of a man laying on his

back with his rifle across his chest. He appears to be deceased, but his arms are kind of folded over his chest, and that I'm laying here dead or something. There's also another man who is falling and appears to as if he is falling, almost as if he has been shot. And here's the hardest part about that. There's not a whole lot of other information in the photo of the ground appears to be rather recently cut wheat. But what you can see is the background. Off in

the distance. You can see some mountains. You can see what looks like some tilled fields, and maybe a farmhouse. They're very very far and hard to see that maybe possibly could be a lake that's actually a field, that's actually a field. That's what the unfortunate thing, right that you're about to say is that, like the background of both of these images is almost identical. I lay them up.

You to have seen this image that I put on, I've you know, my thing is I put stuff in the photoshop and I start toggling back and forth and the gifts of it and then I give you these gifts of these images flipping back and forth, and these images laid on top of each other are almost a perfect match, as if the images were taken almost all the exact same spot. It's almost, yeah, it's almost like somebody put a camera somewhere and was like, okay, actor one go, actor to go, act three go. Somebody did

put it. It appears to me that the camera was not not on the same spot. It was on a tripod. It absolutely did not move. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at the you look at the borders and stuff, and then the features in the background, in the foreground and everything, it appears to me that it was on a tripod. Yeah. No, but that's what I mean, like literally, like said, you know, a tripod because the falling soldier everything is in motion and it's hard to do on a tripod, whereas the

second soldier is perfectly Chris. But either way, it was somebody standing there with a camera stationary going okay, all right, we got a line of soldiers. Now everybody's gonna fake being shot, all right, three? Yeah, who can do the best fake? Who can do it? And the cynical But the second soldier, the second soldier who appears to be

falling down. He's very identifiable when you compare him to the falling soldier because where as a falling soldiers in a white shirt and light colored pants, this man is in what they call a boiler suit, basically a jump suit. And where is the falling soldier has his AMMO bags on his hip and the suspenders are going over his shoulders. This second guy in the boiler suit, his suspenders almost run up the center of his torso before wiring off

over each shoulder. So very different. They looked different for holding their guns. Like, the thing that's really interesting about these photos is when when you were like, oh, I posted a gift before I had done any kind of reading or research on this, I was like, oh, there's the reel and the fake where I I thought the second one with the more identifiable one, I mean because his his fatigues look real worn in, looks like he's done some stuff. His body is just like crumpled, you know.

I was like, oh, the second soldier arm, the not famous one. Yeah, I was like, wow, that looks like human who just got shot and it's dead. And then the other one I was like, wow, that's a really clean outfit to bee. But I mean that was the interesting thing to me about this whole thing was that you posted these pictures and my immediate thought, here's the fake of yeah, and at least as you know, like somebody who knows historical fashion and things like that, was like, oh,

there's the costume and there's the original. So here's the deal is that there's a there's a guy. His name is Jose Manuel so sparag We. I believe it's how you say. He's a university professor in Spain. And what he did is he took these two photos. He didn't take actually the falling man photo. He took the man laying prone and quote unquote shot and dead and the boiler suit man photo. And he sent those around two people in the area in Spain to try and identify

the background. And that's how have this idea that it is probably in Espejo Is where the photo was taken. And the real big problem because these people are like, oh yeah, no, I recognized this, and then they got ahold of locals who were you know, at this point, old men and women at that time, and said, oh, yeah, the fighting here there was early in September and it wasn't more fighting until the September. Will remember view ran the image on the twenty three September, so it can't

be fighting in espeyho. That really makes a lot of problems then, because if it is that he took that in his spah, then it appears that there was no conflict, which appears that then it does lead a lot of credence to the idea that oh no, it was it was totally stage for the camera, or maybe maybe somebody just shot the guy wasn't even more related. Yeah, and that's that's actually we're going to get that into our

next theory. And actually another theory that I like right now is that it didn't mean the stage somebody getting shot. He was actually going to take a portrait of the soldier. And he says back up a little bit, that's beautiful. Monty pythought, Oh yeah, no, um, And and listen, this is we've we've said this a couple of times, but it is this is not the first instance. If indeed this theory is true of somebody manipulating a photo. You guys probably have seen this photo YouTube in the room,

but everybody else out there may have as well. There is a photo titled the Valley of the Shadow of Death by Roger Fenton. And what's that it's from? And it's this it's during um oh god, it's the Crimean War. And there's there's this road and there is cannonballs all up and down the sides of the road and all over the road owed itself, and it is just like, what the hell kind of crazy conflict took place here?

And that is the photo that became very iconic until later on a sister photograph showed up which was the same scene from the same location, same angle, everything, except there was no cannonballs on the rolls in there. No they It turns out they took a lot of work for like a hundred years or hundred fifty years for people to figure this out. Photoshop is how they figured

it out. The photographer did the second photo that no cannonballs on road photo, and then he and his assistants went out, wrapped cannonballs off of the side of the road and chucked them onto the road because the military is they're moving through had kicked all of the cannonballs out of the way because you can't do your you can't have your horses in your arts coming through with these balls away, so they pushed them into the ditches.

They put them all back on the road or a bunch of them to then take this second photo that was obviously much more powerful because everybody, oh my gosh, look at that right. Well, and actually that's totally out then, because the first balls were on the road because somebody put them there, and then the second ones were the

Sunday put them there. You go. Uh. There's another actually really iconic photograph we've all seen, and it's been questioned for about fifty plus years now about whether it was stage or not, and that is the the famous photo of these this half a dozen Marines raising the flag on the El g in the Pacific World War two, and that was and and that one's pretty pretty certifiably absolutely not staged, but there were questions about it still

for like understandingly, yeah, yeah, there's the there's the there's a famous photo of the here in Oregon, the Columbia River Gorge. This was back in the mid eighteen hundreds and there was a photographer god I can't remember his name now, but he was using these crazy monstrous plate cameras like twenty two by thirty inch play humongous things. I can't remember the guys. Yeah, I had it written down and then I moved it and I lost it. But anyway, he took this great image of the Columbia

River gorge. But he took the first image and there was a tree in the middle of his photograph that he didn't like, so he went out, He left his camera where it was, he went up, he cut the tree down, and then he took the picture again. The second is what we all know, like, this is something that happened from day oh yeah, and I was just going to say that, like I guess from like a

again historical fashion kind of climming standpoint. One of the first things I did when I saw this picture was like, all right, what did a Spanish Civil War uniform look like? If well, these guys were militia. They weren't actually enlisted soldiers,

they were militia. So you if you see the photo, there's some of them that looked to be in uniform, and then there's a bunch of them that close they really weren't exactly to neat sides, Like certainly no, no, that's certainly true, But you know, like, what were the clothes, what were the general uniforms of people at that time, And that that's the other thing that's really hard to tell, is like I can't even tell what this image is

supposed to be even representing. You know, the closest thing I can get is to a dude who's wearing this outfit but also with a cape and a fez. I mean, it's like seriously, like you're laughing, but there's like that's the closest uniform that I can get to with it, and you know, and then all the other pictures are are of these fatigues that I would expect to see on a battlefield, especially in the trenches. And so that's like, I guess that's another thing that I tend to look at.

I mean, whether that has married or not. Um, that's something that I tend to look at when we're kind of analyzing these historic things as well. Is you know, is somebody who's going to be really in the trenches. Is somebody who's honestly in the trenches getting shot in a war on the front lines going to have a

totally untainted uniform on in all light colors. And that's one of those things that I guess and it's amazing they're all clean if he knows every but I mean, at least the like the other the like the following photo where we're safe from the same angle but it's in better view. But what his fatigues are darker there. They look like, you know, the pants are rolled up,

the sleeves are rolled up. It looks worn. It looks real versus the other one, which is why I was immediately like, oh cool, there's like the real one and the stage one. But I mean, it looks like a muddy place that they're in, and the fact that his clothes are totally white. Crazy. I mean, that's crazy. I'm not saying that it proves anything or doesn't prove anything, but it would be dusty. But it wouldn't be muddy, but it would be getting on their clone. It would

be dirty. It wouldn't be this pristine quite because it looks like in he looks like he had his wash his shirt and then he ran up the hill right again. Though, like this isn't a definitive thing one way or the other, but that's something that always plays in my mind of looking at the close it could be like it makes it even more tragic. Is that he it was just his first day. He just oh, I am here, bang,

and then he didn't have that time to go down. Well, he's in a lot of photo He's in at least four different images that I saw of Robert kappas from that day in that same series, So I think it's four. There's four of seven or eight of that a series are available, and he isn't at least two. I take that back. He's actually in two or three. He's not in every single one, but he's there in quite a few of them. But let's let's move. Let's move into

the last theory that we have. This is a bit of an amalgamation of the the lat the theory that we've just been talking about, which is indeed the whole thing's started out as a fake and then it all got real. And by that, how this theory goes is that yes, Kappa and Gerda are they're they're getting the soldiers to run this maneuver form and show this stuff.

What they don't realize is there is actually a small encampment of enemy soldiers nearby who as they watched them doing their maneuvers and running around and jumping over the trenches and firing into the distance, and YadA, YadA, YadA, think,

what the hell, I why are they trying? I can't believe they know we're here and they're attacking us, and so they they fight back, and it's during one of these feigned runs that Kappa is shooting photographs of that the man in the falling Soldier image, who, by the way, we don't know who that man is to this day, but he is indeed hit by a bullet from an enemy that was, as yet until that point unknown to be in the area. Yeah. I kind of like that theory.

That doesn't necessarily have to be like, oh, we were defending ourselves. It could be as simple as they had this kind of covert camp and you yeah, and they don't know, and then the guys are like, oh yeah, we're gonna run all these training exercises and they're like, wow, this is sniper fodder. The hard part is that there there is. So there's a couple of problems with that. One is that Kappa interview. He talks about machine gun fire.

But for a man to be hit like that with a machine gun, you gotta be relatively close, So it can't be any kind of snipersh situation. Who's that guy? Oh gosh, I can't remember. I think it might have been like CNN or Fox or something. He was like a news reporter. He was like a big in a foxhole. No, he wasn't in a foxhole. He was like, oh, our helicopter was shocked William Yeah, yeah, yeah, and he was like, oh, we were shut down. I mean, this is this would

not be the first time. This would not be the first time that somebody who was a journalist inflated the story behind an image, right, So, I mean, even if he was like it was drills and then this guy got shot down, he could have gone the extra step of saying, oh, and there was machine gun fire. It was awful. It was really dangerous. The thing I find weird, though, is that Kappa didn't seem to be particularly tight lipped

about his stuff. He seemed to be a rather open talkative guy in general most of his stuff, and yet this particular one he didn't talk a lot about, which

is that's the trick with lying. You know that, well, but that's what that's what makes people think that, well, maybe that's why it's a fake, is that he didn't want to talk about it because it was fake or I've always wondered, well, what about as you know, Joe made the joke earlier, was you know, somebody says pe pew as you run and you fall and you you die, and the first guy they go pup and the first the first guy in the boiler suit falls down and

the second guy goes running and instead of going pup, somebody actually that does actually pull the triggers and kill the guy. And then you're like, I've just witnessed a true god murderer because it was an accident, but it was that was murderer, not necessarily murder. Could have been a gun accident as is. Yeah, it's it's friendly fire, which you don't want to tell the world that you got a famous photograph courtesy of friendly fire and nobody

would talk about it. There's here's Here's let me finish is that here's the one really important thing in that area where all of this is supposed to have taken place. You know, it was never reported until the September casualties. Nobody was reported as having been killed in that entire time. So if it was friendly fire casualty, that's why you

would cover that up. And that's all I was going to say was that, like, I I feel like this is kind of that like double blind thing, even though or like sometimes I was an expert liar as a child. I'll tell you so, like, well, we've been working with you for about five years now, we have figured out that you're an expert liar. So the thing you do is you convince yourself of a lie. Right, you come up with like, here's my backstory, and then you come up with your like okay, and then if this were

my backstory, how would I react? And if if I were reacting that way, how would I pretend to be reacting? Right? Do you following me? And she was really scripting this out, but I guess, but no, I'm saying that, like okay, so that's how a good works. Well, that's I mean, And that may be like how Robert Kappa was working. Is that, like you know, he was like, all right,

I staged all this stuff. This is great. Um, if I want to keep this story going, of this fake story, I have to act like it was real that this person got shot in front of me. And what does a person who saw somebody get shot in front of them acts like but I'm an outgoing person, so I should be normally talking about it. So what is the way that me, a normally talking about a person reacts to Oh yeah, right, So it's like that five deep lie of I don't get I get it. It's not good.

I understand where you're going. It's not the best, it's not the worst. And that's the problem with this story, right, And that's yeah, that's the hard part. He said. He does so much stuff in his life, he is so willing to do. He seems to be so willing to talk about most things. This is the thing that really

kind of put him on the map. And you would really hate to tell the world by the way, I know you love me now, but that first thing I did, that's totally a fake because that is that is not how Oprah got her start, and that would destroy the open Empire. She's like, oh, and by the way, that first season was totally fake. But on the other hand, you mean you can also say, like, but also at eighteen, I took a picture of a person being killed in

front of me. I watched somebody die. It could be that, or it could be he was embarrassed because he didn't actually he didn't actually take the picture in a conscious way. He just stuck his camera, he sat up above the time and took a picture. He might have felt a little embarrassed about the fact that this is Sillier random things supposedly like his greatest picture ever, and it's also his most random, dumb luck picture ever. Do I mean, I don't give him any credit for it. If he

actually did take that picture, it's a real picture. But I also wonder a little bit too if like there's a little bit of guilt there with Like, again, you said, this guy has never been identified. Yeah, you know, and there was there was a okay, so just so you know, for many, many years, there was a lot of talk that the falling Soldier was actually a famous Spanish revolutionary.

It was then very exclusively proven and by the way, Magnum and Whalen and everybody's like, oh, yeah, it's going to be him because of this information, but it's very conclusively proven that he died somewhere else. Because here's the other problem is that if we look at the landscape, it looks like it's fields, but the battle that it is said to have taken place in is in more of a mountainous wooded area, and that guy was they found his body against a tree in a wooded space,

like they know, they know it's not hill. Yeah, but I guess I can also see the feeling of guilt of making your name on the death of somebody that you don't know. Yeah, you know, I'm the death of anybody. Of course, if you're a war correspondent, you know you

probably have to be used to that by now. But if that was your first one at eighteen years old, like put yourself like at eighteen seeing somebody dying, taking a picture and suddenly because of that, but he's like the picture, it's like his camera up about the camera took a picture and he might not even have known for weeks that he even took that picture. For sure, Yeah, for sure. I mean I think that that this is why this is the story that we're covering. Right, So

there's so many different things. We haven't done this in a while, but I want to do this is I want to do a very quick round table four or five sentence reason. What do you think? What is your your preferred answer? Certain an answer, Okay, my preferred answer is that it probably was staged, and I don't totally blame him for doing it, because again, he probably at a certain point, you get frustrated, Like I said, you keep trying to catch that special little moment you never do.

Finally you say screw it. You post for a picture so that I don't blame him, Okay, I don't. Okay, I you know, Unfortunately I agree. I do feel like it's staged. I hate that you're actually counting on your fingers, how many sentences I'm saying that was number three? I know, I know, I I think I think it was staged, unfortunately, because it doesn't. It's not real. It's just not it's not.

But that doesn't. That's not to diminish the experiences that he had or the talents that he had, but it is just to say that this particular photo was fake, like his name and his wife's name or lover yeah, his girlfriend. Yeah, no, I I feel like it. I also agree that I think that it was a stage photo. And it kills me to say that because as did you guys watch any of the documentaries on him, Did you get a chance to do that the outside of

the specific topic. You know, it's one of those things you do when I mean we ask, oh, did you watch this completely? I've been watching documentaries on the man and his imagery, Like I saw it it first, he's talented. I don't. First I did amazing of things that he saw, likes with a lot of photographers, so I wanted to

be real. And I see all of the body of he had seven hundred seventy or seven hundred thousand images he left behind like it is an amazing breadth of work, and I hate to think that it was all leveraged off of a falsification, but I cannot say that. I feel that it wasn't anymore. By the way, if you go out there, there's a two thousand three documentary made on it. Please somebody find an original copy of that and put it on the internet, because there is one

on YouTube that is great. It's like an hour and twenty seven minutes long, but some jackass has hacked it up and spliced it out of order, and so it's like forty five minutes and then it jumps around like it's confusing. Realistically, that's probably the way that they've gotten past issue. I know, but it's still get to download and but is it. Well, here's what I'll say is that he would not be the first artist ever to make his name on a Baker Forture war correspondence. Absolutely,

and there's like genuinely historic. I mean, like we talked about Thomas Edison, super famous dude who stole literally everything that he ever did, right, I mean, I don't think that it takes away from his talent, but but he's incredibly talented. But unfortunately, but it is an unfortunate start we now know, but I have not stopped. It could have been actually a very auspicious start because maybe his

reasoning was and I could sort of see this. It's like, I really want to be able to go out and do this, take all these pictures so everybody around the world can see what's going on out here in the battlefield. But unfortunately, I really can't afford to do it. I've got to go out there and I've got to take some killer picture that will put me on a map, and then I'll get those higher fees and then and

and that I'll be able to do this. Yeah. No, and without that, I mean, he was the only photographer on Omaha Beach on the day. We wouldn't have those images. There's images from when he uh, the the year that he died, when he was into the Indo China War. I mean I stopped, I paused the video. I looked at it. It is beautiful with soldiers walking line, there's tank, there's dust of sunset. This is all in black and white.

Remember there's no color, and it is image. He did a fantastic job, and I would recommend that everybody go out and look at Kappa's work. We will, of course have the image of the falling soldier on the website. I will also put up as a secondary link the comparison photo that I've made, the animated gift that is rotating so you can see them overlaid on each other, because it really helps explain what we've talked about so far. That is all going to be on our website, which

is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. There'll be a couple of other search links on there as always, and then you can listen to and download the episode from there. On the website, you're also going to find the episode list as a separate page, and then you'll also find links to merchandise so hats, mugs, coffee cups, sob shirts, all that no hats, actually no hats, shirts and all that kind of stuff. Don't have a hat because embroidery is expensive, it turns out, so that stuff is all

on the website. Now, if you don't want to just listen to and download through the website, you can always go to any of the streaming services. So if you get your podcasts through Apple, you can go ahead and subscribe and leave us a rating. We appreciate that and that helps others find us. We're also in other streaming services, so are good friends at Stitcher have us, so you

can always find us on Stitcher. We are all over social media, so we have the Facebook page and the Facebook groups of the pages where we put episodes and other fun stuff, and then the group is where the episode discussions will happen. There's also episode discussions that happened on our subreddit, so you can look that up. And then we have a couple other places. We have Twitter where there's some conversations and fun stuff going, and then

Instagram were putting other weird funds. There's all kinds of fun, weird stuff coming from thinking. You can connect with all of us. Absolutely. Remember on Instagram, it is not thinking sideways is thinking Sideways Podcast thanks to it from our Facebook or our website, you get to the right spot. And of course if you questions, comments, stories, you want to suggest, you can reach out and give those two us directly through our email, which is Thinking Sideways Podcast

at gmail dot com. It takes us a little bit these days to get back, but we're always trying to get back to people as quickly as we can, so if it doesn't happen on day one, I apologize, but we're doing our best. That thing is always full. It's literally us three, literally responding to everything. We don't have still to get me turn all right, we should call Justin again. Yeah, podcast doesn't do anything. I think. That is all that I have to say about this particular mystery.

It's all laid out there in black and white. So we will talk to you guys next week, fake but real. I'm sorry for the successfully nerdy episode.