The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa,
one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in
1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.

Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Shots from the Spanish Civil War battle of Rio Segre were made from the newly discovered negatives of Gerda Taro
and Robert Capa.

Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still
thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of
a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under
Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.

Last month they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown
Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. “This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis,
the center’s chief curator.

“The Falling Soldier” by Robert Capa

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.

Doubts about the photograph have persisted. In part this is because Capa made no pretense of journalistic detachment
during the war and was known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. The discovery of a negative,
especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate.

Shots of soldiers at rest were also made from the newly discovered negatives.

But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons.
This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare,
played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever
— “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering
it more cinematic and unreal. (Capa, not surprisingly, later served a stint in Hollywood, befriending directors
like Howard Hawks and romancing Ingrid Bergman.)

Capa practically invented the image of the globe-trotting war photographer,
with a cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth and cameras slung over his fatigues.
His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway
and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan
wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking.”

In a Warholian way that seems only to increase his contemporary allure,
he also more or less invented himself. Born Endre Friedmann in Hungary,
he and Gerda Taro, his partner professionally and at one time personally,
cooked up the persona of Robert Capa — they billed him as “a famous American photographer”
— to help them get assignments. He then proceeded to embody the fiction and make it true.

Curators at the International Center of Photography have begun a months-long effort to conserve and catalog the
newly discovered work. Mr. Wallis said that while conservation experts from the George Eastman House in Rochester
are only now beginning to assess the condition of the film, it appears to be remarkably good for 70-year-old nitrate
stock stored in what essentially looks like confectionery boxes.

“They seem like they were made yesterday,” he said. “They’re not brittle at all. They’re very fresh.”

The Republican soldiers at Segovia front in Spain in 1936, taken by Gerda Taro.

The research could bring about a reassessment of the obscure career of Taro, one of the
first female war photographers. She and Capa worked closely together and labeled some of
their early work with joint credit lines, sometimes making it difficult to establish authorship conclusively,
Mr. Wallis said. He added that there was even a remote possibility that “The Falling Soldier” could be by Taro
and not Capa.

“That’s another theory that’s been floated,” he said. “We just don’t know. To me that’s what’s so exciting about
this material. There are so many questions and so many questions not even yet posed that they may answer.”

Robert Capa in Spain in 1937, by Gerda Taro.

Ultimately, Mr. Wallis said, the discovery is momentous because it is the raw material from the birth of
modern war photography itself.

“Capa established a mode and the method of depicting war in these photographs, of the photographer not being
an observer but being in the battle, and that became the standard that audiences and editors from then on demanded,
” he said. “Anything else, and it looked like you were just sitting on the sidelines. And that visual revolution he
embodied took place right here, in these early pictures.”

Photo: Robert Capa, courtesy of Cornell Capa/Magnum Photos
© Reuters/Scanpix
© Robert Capa, courtesy of Cornell Capa/Magnum Photos
©The New York Times