Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways is not brought to you by spam emails
Speaker 1: about spam protection new Instead, it's brought to you by
Speaker 1: crime Con. That's right. Crime Con is back this year.
Speaker 1: It's going to be in Nashville, Tennessee, on May four
Speaker 1: through the sixth. That's the weekend. Thank god. Uh if
Speaker 1: there's gonna be lots of famous people you've heard of
Speaker 1: and seeing on TV. There's gonna be true crime authors,
Speaker 1: real police type persons and retired police type persons and
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff like that, plus podcasters. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be there for one thing. And of course it's
Speaker 1: gonna be in Nashville, so that's a cool town. That's
Speaker 1: that's gonna be fun right in and of itself. So
Speaker 1: come and see us. We'll probably have a meet up too.
Speaker 1: So we go to crime con dot com use supremo
Speaker 1: code sideways and you will get ten percent off your
Speaker 1: ticket price. So remember that crime con dot com promo
Speaker 1: code sideways. Thinking Sideways podcast is also brought to you
Speaker 1: by the audiobook Condition of the Wife between Us by
Speaker 1: Grea Hendrix and Sarah Peckin. In Yes, you now hear
Speaker 1: the story. Listeners are calling wow, just wow, and one
Speaker 1: of the best audio books ever. Here's what the New
Speaker 1: York Times book review said, quote A friendlessly smart cat
Speaker 1: and masks thriller. Unquote it sounds like something I might
Speaker 1: just read myself, or better still, I'll pick up the
Speaker 1: audiobook and listen to it. Uh. It is a narrated
Speaker 1: by Julia Whalen. It's twisty psychological suspense about a jealous wife.
Speaker 1: But it's not what you think it is. So start
Speaker 1: listening now. I McMillan audio dot com slash wife between us.
Speaker 1: It's quickly start working. Well, hey there, and welcome again
Speaker 1: to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I am Steve, joined
Speaker 1: as usual by Devin and Joe were and this week,
Speaker 1: once again, we're going to talk about a mystery. But
Speaker 1: as I said last week, we are not going to
Speaker 1: talk about the same kind of mystery that we've been
Speaker 1: talking about for several weeks in a row, which is
Speaker 1: the gory grossky. Yeah, we're going to do that thing
Speaker 1: that we do because we're a podcast about unsolved mystery
Speaker 1: is not true crime, and talk about something that's like
Speaker 1: a mystery that is totally not gory. It does involve
Speaker 1: somebody getting shot to death. There's no crime. This no mystery. No,
Speaker 1: the only thing there is the mystery. Okay, alright, Actually,
Speaker 1: if it depends on who you ask. I mean, as
Speaker 1: some people consider the entire Spanish Civil War to be
Speaker 1: a huge crime, that's true. That's true. Okay, Well listen,
Speaker 1: here's here's the deal is. Today's mystery is entirely centered
Speaker 1: around the authenticity of a photograph that is commonly known
Speaker 1: as the Falling Soldier. And this photo, which you've probably seen,
Speaker 1: was taken in ninety six and shows a Republican soldier
Speaker 1: during the Spanish Civil War who's in midfall after supposedly
Speaker 1: having been shot and killed. And here's the thing is,
Speaker 1: I had never ever seen this photo. I don't think
Speaker 1: I had supposedly like one of the most famous war
Speaker 1: photos ever taken. Great, here's but here's what I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: as as a sovereign human, is that I genuinely never
Speaker 1: seen this photo before. And if you have not, if
Speaker 1: you are like Devin, stop now look up. Go look
Speaker 1: up the Falling Soldier by Robert Kappa, or check out
Speaker 1: our website Thinking podcast dot com. There will be a
Speaker 1: picture right there too. So let's let's give you the
Speaker 1: mystery here let's give you a little description. So our soldier.
Speaker 1: He's wearing a white shirt, he's got light colored pants on.
Speaker 1: He's got this really distinct set of ammunition bags with
Speaker 1: suspenders holding them up on his shoulders, and he's falling
Speaker 1: backwards his knees your and his right arm is fully outstretched.
Speaker 1: He's got a rifle in his hand, it's almost dropping
Speaker 1: or flinging it away from himself, but his body is
Speaker 1: twisting to the left, away from where the photographer is.
Speaker 1: Did the rifle have a bayonet on it? Okay, no
Speaker 1: it did not, But he is turning away. That's not
Speaker 1: a stupid question. Yeah, that was a thing during that time.
Speaker 1: It still is. Technically you don't fix for the charge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but no, he's he's twisting away and his head is
Speaker 1: turned also to the left, away from the photographer. And
Speaker 1: people say that he has just either been shot in
Speaker 1: the chest or shot in the head, and that this
Speaker 1: photo has literally captured him in the moment that he dies.
Speaker 1: So that's that's what really gets everybody up, is like,
Speaker 1: this is such an amazingly it's such an amazing capture
Speaker 1: my photographer, and captured an extremely random way. Also, yeah,
Speaker 1: that you've heard the story about well, yeah, well we'll
Speaker 1: talk about that shortly. Um, I want to tell everybody
Speaker 1: who took the photo of first, it was taken by
Speaker 1: a photo actually very very famous now today, well known
Speaker 1: photographer and beginning then he was a beginning photo journalists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just started out. And that's a guy by the
Speaker 1: name of Robert Kappa. And to this day, though people say, listen,
Speaker 1: Kappa really did take that photo in the conditions he said,
Speaker 1: or no, that photo was a fake and it's not real,
Speaker 1: even though as Joe said, it's considered one of the
Speaker 1: best photos from a war. Fake. I know your mind
Speaker 1: are going, I think it's been photoshop. Just this guy
Speaker 1: pretended to get shot, right, he would actually get killed
Speaker 1: in the circumstances that are described surrounding this. Yeah, photo shop,
Speaker 1: weird ai monster, none of those, none of those two,
Speaker 1: none of that maybe but probably Okay, okay, So let's
Speaker 1: start at the beginning here. Let me give you a
Speaker 1: little bit about Robert Kappa, and then we'll move into
Speaker 1: the situation that leads him to be where he was
Speaker 1: to take the photo. Kappa was originally he was born
Speaker 1: with the name Andre Friedman. He was born in Budapest
Speaker 1: nine and he was Jewish, and that would be something
Speaker 1: that would push him across Europe and eventually to the
Speaker 1: New World, to the America's based on the political climates
Speaker 1: in Europe at the time. He left Hungry when he
Speaker 1: was accused of being a Communist sympathizer, which he would
Speaker 1: then say, okay, well I gotta get out of here.
Speaker 1: Like literally they said, well, they said, listen, if you
Speaker 1: get out of town in twenty four hours and don't
Speaker 1: come back to the country, we won't do anything to you.
Speaker 1: So he had the bad fortunate of choosing Germany. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say, you know, as I say that it's
Speaker 1: not bad bad fortune because that is where he was
Speaker 1: able to learn and perfect some of his trade, which
Speaker 1: is photography, and it actually is what launched his career.
Speaker 1: I mean. The other option there is right that maybe
Speaker 1: he like actually was a Nazi and like intentionally moved
Speaker 1: to Germany and then like later in life was like
Speaker 1: that was a mistake. No, no, no, he was definitely
Speaker 1: against what the Nazi stood for, so that is definitely
Speaker 1: not great. But I'm not sure how many Jews were
Speaker 1: pro Nazis. Nobody's ever heard from them again, but no,
Speaker 1: so he went there. He stayed in Germany for about
Speaker 1: two years where he learned his his craft, and then
Speaker 1: he left in nineteen thirty three and he moved to Paris,
Speaker 1: where the Germans will never never get him. That was
Speaker 1: the thing about that war, though, right, is that like
Speaker 1: he could pretty much move almost anywhere in your Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much. Yeah. So he gets to he to Germany.
Speaker 1: He meets a bunch of other immigrants there who are
Speaker 1: also become these huge names in photography. But while he's there,
Speaker 1: he meets this woman and her name is I listened
Speaker 1: to her name so many times and I know I'm
Speaker 1: gonna mess it up, and I apologize. It is Gerta pohorl.
Speaker 1: I believe that's how you say it. And if I again,
Speaker 1: I apologize, if I if I mispronounced that, Like I said,
Speaker 1: I listened to it on a documentary a bunch of
Speaker 1: times and I couldn't. She can't complain. Well, now, that's
Speaker 1: that's kind of that's heartless. But the point is here
Speaker 1: she and Andre Friedman meet. They they begin to they're
Speaker 1: both photographers. They're trying to sell photos and get jobs,
Speaker 1: but they're not really making any money, and she comes
Speaker 1: up with this brilliant scheme. She's the one that kind
Speaker 1: of makes Robert Kappa because here's what she figures out
Speaker 1: is that as a Jewish man, he is having a
Speaker 1: very hard time because there's there's prejudices and people just
Speaker 1: don't want to pay money for photos from this run
Speaker 1: of the middle photo guy anyway. But if they say,
Speaker 1: and this is what they do, they say, listen, there's
Speaker 1: actually this very famous photographer named Robert Kappa from America,
Speaker 1: and he's here and I'm negotiating on his behalf and
Speaker 1: it would be an insult for you to not pay
Speaker 1: him X amount for his photos. Well, his photos were
Speaker 1: good enough, and like, well, we'll go ahead, we'll bring us,
Speaker 1: bring us to this job. And they got it and
Speaker 1: they get paid it. I feel like they pull the
Speaker 1: whole thing off. I really feel like this like speaks
Speaker 1: so deeply to me because I have this like deep
Speaker 1: seated belief that like women by and large are the
Speaker 1: ones who like hustle. We are the ones who like
Speaker 1: come up with these amazing like business schemes and really
Speaker 1: like hustle to make things happen. And oftentimes it's I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: but oftentimes it is to you know, build up somebody
Speaker 1: that you care about, often like a man that you
Speaker 1: care about. But regardless, I just like that speaks to
Speaker 1: me on such a deep level that she was like, no,
Speaker 1: you know what we should do is just lie about it.
Speaker 1: At the same time, she reinvented herself though. She changed
Speaker 1: her name to Gerda Taro at the same time and
Speaker 1: started pitching her photos as well, and so she was
Speaker 1: selling stuff. The long story is, or the short version
Speaker 1: of this though, is that it works. They start making
Speaker 1: money their travels, they start getting commissions. One of the
Speaker 1: things that they do is they realize that there's the
Speaker 1: civil war starting in Spain and they have this naive
Speaker 1: idea of they want to capture war on film and
Speaker 1: show the you know, what's happening to the people and
Speaker 1: things that you just didn't see because war traditionally was
Speaker 1: only pictures snapped of like the general's the big wigs
Speaker 1: talking and having the conferences, and not the guy in
Speaker 1: the trench bleeding to death. So why do you classify
Speaker 1: that as a naive idea because the way I've understood
Speaker 1: is that it's it's that very young idea of we're
Speaker 1: going to what it's going to be beautiful and nothing's
Speaker 1: going to happen, And yeah, I guess that wasn't that
Speaker 1: doesn't work out in the long run to be a wonderful, beautiful,
Speaker 1: artistic experience in it becomes very dirty. And that wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily the sense that I had. I mean, they both
Speaker 1: came from kind of war torn places, and they they
Speaker 1: understood the idea of feeling like it was important to
Speaker 1: capture the realities of would be Yeah, I guess it
Speaker 1: just it feels to me like they were making very
Speaker 1: conscious decision to go in. I mean, a lot of
Speaker 1: journalists do this too right now, where they make this
Speaker 1: conscious decision to go in because they think it's important
Speaker 1: that it's not just the generals in their pretty uniforms
Speaker 1: in their beautiful rooms that they're oak table, right, and
Speaker 1: that's that everybody should know what war actually looks like.
Speaker 1: And you know, again, yes, it's maybe a little naive
Speaker 1: to assume that bad things won't happen to them, or
Speaker 1: that it's going to be fun and beautiful, but I
Speaker 1: think they it's my sense that they had at least
Speaker 1: a pretty realistic idea of what a war torn place
Speaker 1: looks like. Personality. Yeah, this is also not a new idea.
Speaker 1: I mean they've been ever since photography began, people have
Speaker 1: been taking pictures. Yeah, a new idea, absolutely, But I
Speaker 1: didn't think that as a as a war correspondent, you
Speaker 1: do have the luxury of being able to pop in
Speaker 1: and take some pictures, it's interview and then leave, you know,
Speaker 1: which is not something the guys in the trenches get
Speaker 1: to do. That's that's the really horrible thing about warrible
Speaker 1: besides getting arms and legs blown off, you know, but
Speaker 1: it's just living in these awful conditions for weeks months.
Speaker 1: But see that was that was eventually that would be
Speaker 1: the thing that distinguished Robert Kappa so much is that
Speaker 1: he would pop into a trench or a foxhole, sit
Speaker 1: there and smoke a cigarette and talk to a guy,
Speaker 1: a kid who is freaking the f out because he's
Speaker 1: everything he's called with the day, you know, wwing up
Speaker 1: all around. He's just having a conversation kids, able to
Speaker 1: kind of focus in. Like I've watched documentaries and people
Speaker 1: like he was amazing, Like this stuff didn't stuff is
Speaker 1: not the word I wanted to use, But it didn't
Speaker 1: phase him. He just didn't. He just so he had
Speaker 1: that kind which is why I kind of had that
Speaker 1: sense of like they knew what they were getting into.
Speaker 1: I mean, they hadn't seen a lot of developed nature,
Speaker 1: and that could be that could again be like a
Speaker 1: impression of them. They could have gone into it totally
Speaker 1: blind and it just happened that they were good at it.
Speaker 1: They could have been like, this is going to be
Speaker 1: beautiful and amazing. It's gonna be like woodstock all over again. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there are there's such a thing. Actually, there's some
Speaker 1: been some beautiful war photography. It's really huntingly beautiful. So
Speaker 1: here's so. Like I said, though, let's get back into
Speaker 1: this part of the story. At the beginning of what
Speaker 1: leads up to the Falling Soldier is that they get
Speaker 1: this commission, and I believe it's View magazine, which is
Speaker 1: a French magazine. They get a commission, they go to
Speaker 1: Pain to check out the war, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: give you the loosest, loosest basic primer on what the
Speaker 1: Spanish Civil War was. There's tons of information out there,
Speaker 1: and if you want to dive deep into this do so.
Speaker 1: It's very interesting, but it's not our total focus here.
Speaker 1: But basically the disclaimer here is basically like, this is
Speaker 1: not a podcast about the Spanish. So the simple, simple
Speaker 1: version is between the late nineteen teens to the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties in Spain, there's a series of political upheavals. The
Speaker 1: monarchy becomes unpopular and unstable, and things like communism and
Speaker 1: socialism and right wing fascism start gaining ground. E mentionally,
Speaker 1: everybody is piste off at everybody else, like it's just
Speaker 1: dirty and not good. And there's some unsuccessful coups in
Speaker 1: the early thirties, and then there is one that goes
Speaker 1: off literally with a bang, and everybody is at each
Speaker 1: other's throats and they the country divides into two parties.
Speaker 1: There's the Republicans, which are called the Popular Front, and
Speaker 1: the Nationals nationalists, who are the anti communists, and they
Speaker 1: go at it for I think four yeah, three, about
Speaker 1: three years is how long the Spanish Civil War lasted.
Speaker 1: That is the basic, most basic of that's like not
Speaker 1: even the Wikipedia intro to the actually the if you
Speaker 1: want any any reading on it. George Orwell was took
Speaker 1: part in the war. He was in the trenches. George
Speaker 1: or Well, the the film director George Well the the writer. Yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: he wrote yeah, yeah, well yeah, but you wrote a
Speaker 1: book about about his experiences called Homage to Catalonia, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty good read. It doesn't and he is
Speaker 1: it pains to say. He doesn't talk about it completely.
Speaker 1: He talks about his corner of the war, the things
Speaker 1: that he saw, but also tries to explain some of
Speaker 1: the overarching groups and what they were all about and stuff.
Speaker 1: And he doesn't claim that he explains the entire thing
Speaker 1: in total detail. Yeah, it seems almost impossible to do that.
Speaker 1: The Spanish Civil War is extremely complicated anywhere, and well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of the more complicated ones out there because
Speaker 1: it's the first one where not only is the country
Speaker 1: fighting itself, but this is where the bigger European powers
Speaker 1: like the like the uss are, the Communist nation and
Speaker 1: the Germans and the Americans, like all these different forces
Speaker 1: are starting to push stuff in. It's it's a testing ground.
Speaker 1: It would become World War two. There was. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of a lot of international interference. A
Speaker 1: lot of people came from far and wide to participate
Speaker 1: on both sides of the war. Again like or a well,
Speaker 1: for example, Ernest Hemingway was another one, and there's some
Speaker 1: of the famous figures you could name. Tons of people
Speaker 1: fought in that war. And uh, it's also I think unique,
Speaker 1: or at least the first war really that is totally
Speaker 1: shrouded in clouds of BS. I mean it's a lot
Speaker 1: of there's a lot of BS surrounding this war. That's
Speaker 1: that really has followed us down to this to the
Speaker 1: to the present day. Well, and I can't disagree with
Speaker 1: you because I I really what I wanted to have.
Speaker 1: As you guys know, I've done this before. I'm going
Speaker 1: to give you a two and a half to three
Speaker 1: paragraph description of this war. And as I read it,
Speaker 1: it just became more and more convoluted. So that's a
Speaker 1: that is a great description of the problems with explaining
Speaker 1: this this conflict. Well, yeah, and I don't mean that
Speaker 1: the people the war was BS. I just mean a
Speaker 1: lot of the commentary afterwards, the interpretations that people that
Speaker 1: put on the war and the people fighting it and
Speaker 1: everything else are mostly BS. Yeah, and so with that,
Speaker 1: let's let's move forward. Because I think the one the
Speaker 1: one pertinent bit of information about the Spanish Civil War
Speaker 1: is when it began, because that plays into the date
Speaker 1: of the capture of the image of the falling soldier.
Speaker 1: The war began in July ninety six. Okay, we're going
Speaker 1: to move in. And supposedly the photo the falling Soldier
Speaker 1: was taken in September. We don't know when in September,
Speaker 1: but in September of nineteen thirty six. There's some things
Speaker 1: that can kind of maybe help us figure that out.
Speaker 1: The first of which is when the photo ran, the
Speaker 1: original run date of it. Because if you remember, I said,
Speaker 1: there was View magazine back in Paris, not v Iu. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like the View like yeah, no, that's a
Speaker 1: different show entirely with four women on it. No, they
Speaker 1: were not there. But now this magazine would run the
Speaker 1: image along with several of quite a few other of
Speaker 1: Robert Kappa's images in the September twenty three, nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six issue lost the word issue. So he took it
Speaker 1: at least no later than that morning then and then
Speaker 1: imediately downloaded it to the internet. There is there is
Speaker 1: no internet, there's no editing. He had to hand off
Speaker 1: undeveloped natives to a pilot who would then fly them
Speaker 1: back to Paris, where they would go to a dark room,
Speaker 1: get developed, and then get integrated into the magazine and
Speaker 1: not going to be at least days. And that's the
Speaker 1: corroborated that was the process. He didn't ever see his
Speaker 1: own I mean, he didn't develop on site. No, he didn't.
Speaker 1: He did have I think back in Paris he had
Speaker 1: he did have a dark room, dark room, yeah, but
Speaker 1: but he was he was still in Spain when he
Speaker 1: probably taking pictures presumably, right. But so, I mean that's
Speaker 1: kind of a frustrating little detail in this, right is that.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've all all everybody in this room at
Speaker 1: least has shot film with a camera. Film come back well,
Speaker 1: and and that you like kind of you stick it
Speaker 1: in your tube and you say, like, I mean, how
Speaker 1: much can you say about it? You can't ever go through,
Speaker 1: especially if you don't have a dark room, right, you
Speaker 1: don't have the chance to go through and say like
Speaker 1: frame one, roll one, this is where I took it,
Speaker 1: frame to roll one. Actually, actually a counter to that
Speaker 1: is because as you two know, I'm in a photography
Speaker 1: class right now because I shoot all the time and
Speaker 1: one of the things that I don't do because digital
Speaker 1: makes this so much easier. But this instructor is really
Speaker 1: really pressing on us, and he is old school, a
Speaker 1: very old school. Is you have a notebook. You you
Speaker 1: write down your shot numbers and your exposure time and
Speaker 1: your ugh stop and stuff like that. Now, as a
Speaker 1: war photographer, you can't do that because you're just blazing away.
Speaker 1: But you can stop and write roll to one five
Speaker 1: to one five, this date, this event, like you can
Speaker 1: give the track. It's not like today where you can
Speaker 1: actually just go to the image and look in the
Speaker 1: data in there. It is. You're sure that he there
Speaker 1: was some taking place, but you know this image particularly
Speaker 1: that we're talking about, and the kind of photography he
Speaker 1: was doing, we're talking like actual battlefield like bullets flying
Speaker 1: over your head photography. So I presume that he wasn't
Speaker 1: also like picture snap okay, note book okay, picture snap notebook. No,
Speaker 1: I mean you know, you have to kind of take
Speaker 1: that back. And so that's something else that I would
Speaker 1: just add it to the layer layer complexity, like on
Speaker 1: a role basis the role and then make a note word.
Speaker 1: And so that's that added complexity of us not actually
Speaker 1: having him saying to the publisher this is what I got. Well,
Speaker 1: and here's the other problem is there's the influence or
Speaker 1: the input of the publisher of the photos, because at
Speaker 1: the time that it runs into view, they say that
Speaker 1: the photo was taken in Cordeoba, Spain, but other people
Speaker 1: have come along after the fact and said, oh no,
Speaker 1: that was taken in Sarah Mariano, I believe is how
Speaker 1: you pronounced that city's name. Now, that might not sound
Speaker 1: like a big deal because those two cities are about
Speaker 1: eight miles or twelve kilometers apart, but if there's a war,
Speaker 1: that could actually be pretty important. And as we'll find
Speaker 1: later on, there's even more locations that are suggested where
Speaker 1: this photo might have been taken. So that draws it
Speaker 1: out to not eight miles and twelve kilometers, but thirty
Speaker 1: miles and what is that like eighty kilometers roughly difference.
Speaker 1: I mean, this can be huge differences and where the
Speaker 1: battlefront is. So that also throws, you know, question of
Speaker 1: was he taking in the serene place or was it
Speaker 1: somewhere where all hell was breaking loose. For his part,
Speaker 1: Robert Kappa never really talked about this photo and what
Speaker 1: the circumstances around it. He's really kind of tight lipped
Speaker 1: around it, which was weird. Because he was such an
Speaker 1: outgoing and and very fun and playful man. And you subscribe,
Speaker 1: I'll talk about all the few different reasons. Yeah I have.
Speaker 1: I have some ideas too. But according to him, in
Speaker 1: one of the few interviews that he did, what he
Speaker 1: said was, actually, Joe, do you mind reading this? It
Speaker 1: seems right up your ally, my friend with the Hungarian accident. No, no,
Speaker 1: just do it, please don't. In fact, quote, I was
Speaker 1: there in the trench with about twenty Melicianos. I just
Speaker 1: kind of put my camera above my head and didn't
Speaker 1: even look and click the picture when they moved over
Speaker 1: the trench, and that was all That camera, which I
Speaker 1: held above my head, just caught a man at the
Speaker 1: moment when he was shot. That was probably the best
Speaker 1: picture I ever took. I never saw the picture in
Speaker 1: the frame. Cancer camera was far above my head. No,
Speaker 1: that's that's amazing because what you need to realize is
Speaker 1: that he's shooting at this time thirty five millimeter film
Speaker 1: has become available, so that's great because it's highly portable.
Speaker 1: He's using a like a camera which is more akin
Speaker 1: to the body a style of a camera you see today.
Speaker 1: Then the old school boxer Brownie style, so it makes it.
Speaker 1: It's amazing to think that he held it up and
Speaker 1: it was as in focus as it was for him.
Speaker 1: It's an amazingly lucky shot that which is also white.
Speaker 1: People question it, well, he probably he probably had a
Speaker 1: stopped way down, you know what I mean, are just
Speaker 1: wide open again as much like but that focus ring
Speaker 1: is the hardest bit. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know if there was a lot of action happening. I
Speaker 1: don't know as much about photography as either of you do, certainly,
Speaker 1: but yeah, we won't develop into nerd talking. It's fine,
Speaker 1: but I would I just say that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: if he had focused from the trench on kind of
Speaker 1: where the front line was happening, and then had to
Speaker 1: duck down because shooting was happening and was just reaching up,
Speaker 1: that might account for in my understanding of photography, might
Speaker 1: account for why it was so in focus. But again,
Speaker 1: it's pretty lucky. Yeah, it was perfectly in focus. Personally,
Speaker 1: there the other photos from that series that are in
Speaker 1: much better focus. But we'll deal with that shortly. Uh,
Speaker 1: Let's let's move to after the fact though, So so
Speaker 1: Kapa takes his shot, he would then eventually leave Spain,
Speaker 1: because remember this war goes on for years, and he
Speaker 1: would go. He would bounce back and forth to Spain
Speaker 1: over the course of that war. Unfortunately, when he left,
Speaker 1: Gerta didn't want to go. She she got another assignment
Speaker 1: and she stayed, and that would end up costing her
Speaker 1: her life. They if you don't know, you actually, if
Speaker 1: you've never heard the story, you don't know this is
Speaker 1: they were lovers. They had a intimate relationship, and when
Speaker 1: she was killed it took a toll on him. She
Speaker 1: was in another battle area. She jumped onto a jeep
Speaker 1: or some kind of vehicle that was moving away and
Speaker 1: a tank rolled into it. She she didn't die that moment,
Speaker 1: she died the next day. Even worse ruled right at
Speaker 1: the time. I believe that the tank hit it, she
Speaker 1: was thrown to the ground, and probably the car rolled
Speaker 1: on top of her because she's writing on the running
Speaker 1: board of the vehicle. So I have a feeling that
Speaker 1: she took massive internal injuries which took about a day
Speaker 1: to kill her. So she is actually considered probably she's
Speaker 1: considered to be probably the first female photo journalists to
Speaker 1: have ever died in a battlefield or war situation. So
Speaker 1: not the title that you want, but you know she
Speaker 1: she earned that fairly prestigious and yeah, absolutely not one
Speaker 1: that you actively aim for. A yes, yeah, at least
Speaker 1: people are going to look back, look at you and say, wow,
Speaker 1: what a dumb, ignominious death. You know, she was in
Speaker 1: there trying to get it. And for his part, Robert
Speaker 1: Kappa would go on, he would fill or he would
Speaker 1: photograph every major conflict from then until his death in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four. He was in he got an assignment
Speaker 1: for Life magazine to take photographs at the end of
Speaker 1: the First Indo China War. This is in Vietnam. It's
Speaker 1: not the actual Vietnam War. The designation for being the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War takes about another year or so. But he
Speaker 1: went were there like, yeah, this is where the French
Speaker 1: were being pushed out and the Vietnam War. It was
Speaker 1: in Vietnam, Yes, but it's got the designation of the
Speaker 1: first and the second Indo China Wars. But the point
Speaker 1: is he's there, he's taking photos of the troops and
Speaker 1: at one point he says he's going to go ahead
Speaker 1: and shoot take photos. Back down the track they're walking,
Speaker 1: he steps on the landmine and that takes his life,
Speaker 1: and that is the end of Robert Kappa. The man
Speaker 1: is well known though. If you've ever seen photos of
Speaker 1: the Omaha Beach in he's the one who took those photos.
Speaker 1: He dove off of a boat with all of these
Speaker 1: marines and soldiers in the thick of it, and he
Speaker 1: took photos the whole time. I think he's shot. He
Speaker 1: shot like a hundred and twenty or a hundred and
Speaker 1: forty images that day. Only eleven of them survived because unfortunately,
Speaker 1: when he sent his film to the UK to get developed,
Speaker 1: a film tech screwed up and destroyed all but those
Speaker 1: eleven iconic images we haveing, but probably the ones that
Speaker 1: got destroyed even more. Yes. So, so he's very well known.
Speaker 1: He is he is the standard of war photography. And
Speaker 1: if you've, like I said, you've probably seen his work.
Speaker 1: He just didn't know who his who he was. Okay,
Speaker 1: so back to the Falling Soldier. Five years go by,
Speaker 1: everybody has taken the story of this photo at face value.
Speaker 1: Nobody has really said, nah, that can't be right. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know it was the time. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it makes total sense. But uh, then in the seventies
Speaker 1: a book comes out and somebody says, I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know if I think that's really real, but we
Speaker 1: don't have anything to corroborate it. And then an amazing
Speaker 1: thing happens, which is remember we said he fled, he
Speaker 1: left Paris because the Nazis were coming. When he did,
Speaker 1: he left his dark room. He left all of his
Speaker 1: film and his negatives there, and he had a suitcase
Speaker 1: with three boxes of of developed film in those boxes. Somehow,
Speaker 1: through some series of events, that suitcase made its way
Speaker 1: into a diplomat's hands. That diplomat took the suitcase to Mexico,
Speaker 1: where it lived for the next seventies some years, until
Speaker 1: such time as a bargain was struck and that film
Speaker 1: was brought forward and given to the Kappa Estate and
Speaker 1: Magnum Photos, and Magnum is the company that he helped
Speaker 1: start with three other a well known photographers back in
Speaker 1: the that would have been in the thirties that he
Speaker 1: did that. But they developed all of the they created
Speaker 1: prints off of all of that that cellulos, and it
Speaker 1: was amazing that it was still viable because if you remember,
Speaker 1: film degrades over time day, so it was amazing that
Speaker 1: the stuff was in really good shape, and they got
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of images from his time in Spain.
Speaker 1: The image of the falling soldiers not in that set,
Speaker 1: but what is in there is some other images that
Speaker 1: he took at the same time, and it helps maybe
Speaker 1: a timeline of where he was and what was going
Speaker 1: on when that particular photo was shot. Thus, even more
Speaker 1: questions are asked now. It was amazing is that not
Speaker 1: only were his photos found in that suitcase, Gerda's photos,
Speaker 1: some of hers were also found. And a man by
Speaker 1: the name of David Seymour who had a really colorful
Speaker 1: nickname that I've forgot but I can't remember his name.
Speaker 1: I loved his nickname, I've forgotten it. But they all
Speaker 1: these lost images of theirs from that war were found,
Speaker 1: which is wonderful. But now what we're left with is
Speaker 1: we have more information, we have more images, but it's
Speaker 1: an incomplete record. And the question here is was the
Speaker 1: falling Man truly taken in a conflict or was it not?
Speaker 1: And it was a staged image. That's what we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about now that we're in theories. But first
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. Hey, Hulu has got a
Speaker 1: new original series coming out. It's called The Looming Towers,
Speaker 1: based on the Pula Surprise winning book by Lawrence Right.
Speaker 1: Uh it is about guess what all the events leading
Speaker 1: up to the Night eleven attacks. The series on of
Speaker 1: the traces, the rising thread of Osama bin Laden and
Speaker 1: al Qaeda, and now the rivalry and the bureaucratic infighting
Speaker 1: between the FBI and the CIA might have prevented us
Speaker 1: from actually heading off those attacks. The Living Tower stars
Speaker 1: Jeff Daniels, I'm sure you heard of him, also Peter
Speaker 1: stars Guard and Tahar Rahim and uh So The Living
Speaker 1: Tower is available now but only on Hulu. Go watching,
Speaker 1: click and we're back. Shim it was Shim, Yes, it
Speaker 1: was Shim, Thank you, thank you. So now that we
Speaker 1: know who it is, let's get into the first theory.
Speaker 1: I took all half hour of our break to google that.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so here we've actually got really three basic theories.
Speaker 1: The first theory is that the photograph is authentic in
Speaker 1: the sense that it is as they said it was taken.
Speaker 1: The Yeah, like, there is no story around the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and it is somebody being killed or at the moment
Speaker 1: of death from being shot with a bullet. It's not
Speaker 1: that outlandis said. You go to a war zone and
Speaker 1: you managed to get a picture of somebody getting shot.
Speaker 1: It happens a lot. I bet it does. Sorry, people
Speaker 1: getting shot in war zones happens a lot. Yes, pictures
Speaker 1: of people getting shot in war zones is harder. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So if we go, if we if we follow this
Speaker 1: sery though, Kappa's biographers and the guys at Magnum Photos,
Speaker 1: which again, like I said earlier, was a company he founded,
Speaker 1: they all say that the photo is the real deal.
Speaker 1: And there's a man by the name of Richard Whalen.
Speaker 1: I believe Whalen is still alive, but I swore I
Speaker 1: saw something that said he actually passed away within the
Speaker 1: last two or three years. But he was a biographer
Speaker 1: of Kappa. And what Whaland did? This was back as
Speaker 1: this was like around two thousand, before the suitcase of
Speaker 1: image had been found. Now, lets see the guy that
Speaker 1: wrote the articles, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, same guy. Pobs stopped
Speaker 1: putting your articles on black backgrounds, but he enlisted the
Speaker 1: help of a homicide detective. Just kidding. No, it's like it. No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't Hotel. I can't remember the guy's name. Is
Speaker 1: it in here, We'll find it. But the point is
Speaker 1: this detective said, yeah, sure, I'll look at the photo.
Speaker 1: That's cool. I've seen a lot of things in my
Speaker 1: line of work as a homicide detective. And what he noticed,
Speaker 1: and he pointed out, was in the image the soldiers
Speaker 1: left hand is barely visible. Now, Remember, I said, the
Speaker 1: man is twisting and fall he's falling backwards, and he's
Speaker 1: twisting to his left away from the photographer, and his
Speaker 1: left hand is barely visible. His legs are bent, and
Speaker 1: that hand you can see it dropping below his left thigh. Well,
Speaker 1: the fingers on that hand are curling that They're curling inwards,
Speaker 1: and not in a relaxed way, not like making a
Speaker 1: fist kind of correct, They're just kind of loose like
Speaker 1: you you know, when you fall asleep and you wake
Speaker 1: up in your hand is just kind of loosely curled
Speaker 1: when you shake your hands out. Yeah, something just like that. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: he said, Listen, most people, when they are falling backwards
Speaker 1: intentionally they cannot help but reflexively put their hand out
Speaker 1: to break their fall or or accidentally falling backwards. Anybody
Speaker 1: who is aware of the fact that they are pulling backwards.
Speaker 1: It's an automatic reaction. But when you are shot or well,
Speaker 1: actually more importantly, when you are deceased, the tension in
Speaker 1: your muscles and your your whole body go out and
Speaker 1: the hands automatically curl inward. And he keyed in on
Speaker 1: that saying, listen, I think the guy is actually dead
Speaker 1: already as he's falling to the ground, and this is
Speaker 1: a symptom of it, that his hand is curling in
Speaker 1: on itself. Okay, that that makes total sense, But I
Speaker 1: have a total issue with it because I'm still struggling
Speaker 1: with the photo sequence, which we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: some more soon. Another another issue is the lack of
Speaker 1: a bullet hole anywhere. Well, they say that he shot
Speaker 1: in the head, and remember I said that if you
Speaker 1: look at this photo, his left the basically the left
Speaker 1: side of his head, you can't really see it in
Speaker 1: the image. I suppose actually, if he was really shot,
Speaker 1: if he was sort of shot in the left side
Speaker 1: of the head, that would explain why he's twisting twisting
Speaker 1: in that direction. Yeah, yeah, that totally like he could
Speaker 1: have been shot in the heart and twisting that his
Speaker 1: white shirt would not show blood yet because if he
Speaker 1: is just the moment of impact and he is initially
Speaker 1: twisting that that flow of blood from everything being cut
Speaker 1: by the bullet is not going to show up. He
Speaker 1: could have been shot left back side of his head too,
Speaker 1: through his because he has black hair, right, so it
Speaker 1: could have been shot in his head. Sorry, I'm going
Speaker 1: away from Mica and its head just like you know,
Speaker 1: flung with the velocity of to the right, because I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of ways that this bullet could have
Speaker 1: impacted him to kill him and make his body turn
Speaker 1: in the method that it did. Now. The the other
Speaker 1: thing that they are pointing to Magnum and Mr Whalen
Speaker 1: has also pointed out was he was looking at the
Speaker 1: timing of the photograph that of the falling Soldier and
Speaker 1: when it was released. There's a guy, he's a contemporary
Speaker 1: Robert Kappa. His name is Hans Nameth Uh and Nameth
Speaker 1: was in Spain at the same time as Kappa doing
Speaker 1: the same thing, doing war journalism. And by the way,
Speaker 1: you also this is another one I'm name dropping again.
Speaker 1: This is also a photographer you know, you know who
Speaker 1: Jackson Pollock is. He's the drip artist from the fifties
Speaker 1: the famous guy. There's iconic photos of Jackson Pollock at work,
Speaker 1: and those photos were taken by Hans name it, so
Speaker 1: you actually know his work as well, even if you
Speaker 1: didn't realize it, you probably you're right. I forget. I
Speaker 1: spent so many years in school in the arts that
Speaker 1: I forget sometimes that not everybody's yeah, like they're just
Speaker 1: I instantly have that like, oh, yeah, I know who
Speaker 1: that is, even before I pulled up the image and
Speaker 1: who it was, and you know that image, Yes, we
Speaker 1: knew that image of him bent over the canvas on
Speaker 1: the floor. Okay. Hans Nameth was near a village this
Speaker 1: is you know in the in September of thirty six,
Speaker 1: early September of thirty six. He's in the village of
Speaker 1: Sarah Mariano when the fighting broke out on the fifth
Speaker 1: and the sixth September, and he took a bunch of
Speaker 1: photographs of the local villagers fleeing that violence, and he
Speaker 1: went on record said, now, I never saw Robert Kappa
Speaker 1: or Gerda at any time while I was there, And
Speaker 1: yet images of those same fleeing villagers were run along
Speaker 1: with the image of the falling soldier in View magazine.
Speaker 1: So it says, wait, Robert Cappa was there, and everybody
Speaker 1: said the image of the falling Soldier was shot was
Speaker 1: taken on the fifth or the sixth, because that was
Speaker 1: when the conflict happened at that location. So that along
Speaker 1: with the last thing that Richard Wayland found, which is
Speaker 1: that the original prints that they dug up, you know,
Speaker 1: Kappa's prints, they were all they were sequentially numbered, that's
Speaker 1: the from when they were originally developed, and the numbers
Speaker 1: on the back of the falling Soldier print is prior
Speaker 1: to the Fleeing Villager p So they're saying, listen, he
Speaker 1: was there. You can we know he was there because
Speaker 1: other photographers have the same people in their images in
Speaker 1: their their photographs, and this is sequential numbering, is showing
Speaker 1: that this had to have all been done prior to
Speaker 1: those villagers images being captured. So that's that's a timeline
Speaker 1: that they've established using those those bits of information. The
Speaker 1: really cynical part of me says, yeah, that film was
Speaker 1: there somebody else, I mean, like you know, who knows
Speaker 1: who had a camera and was willing to sell Robert
Speaker 1: Kappa some film. Actually, I don't think Kappa bought anybody.
Speaker 1: I don't actually think that. But there you actually bring
Speaker 1: up a very interesting point. This is a theory that
Speaker 1: I didn't have in here, but we'll just toss this
Speaker 1: out there as a also floating theory, which is that
Speaker 1: Robert Robert Kappa didn't take the photo, but you know
Speaker 1: who did because they had made a moniker I think
Speaker 1: it was Kappa and taro is is the translation of it.
Speaker 1: They had stamps made up like that was just their brand.
Speaker 1: They worked so closely together that there's questions of some
Speaker 1: of those early photos of which one took them. Now,
Speaker 1: he had a very distinct style, but if you are
Speaker 1: taking photographs with someone all the time and you were
Speaker 1: reviewing your work together, you tend to just naturally pick
Speaker 1: h if you're co developing a style. I mean, they're
Speaker 1: co developing a brand, absolutely right, you know. And so
Speaker 1: maybe and that's one of those things too where it's
Speaker 1: kind of like she was the first woman to die
Speaker 1: on a battlefield as a photojournalist, Like maybe her legacy
Speaker 1: is even broader than we necessarily know. If it is
Speaker 1: true that she took these pictures, but that they just
Speaker 1: thought it would say, because again it's the era. This
Speaker 1: is not me being sexist. This is the Arab being
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's not just the era did It's
Speaker 1: not just the era being sexist, it's the era being
Speaker 1: super racist because obviously he wasn't even selling photos as
Speaker 1: a Jew in that time either. He had to change
Speaker 1: his entire identity. Yeah, he had to change his own identity,
Speaker 1: let alone her having to also change all her identities
Speaker 1: to that. But do you know if Gerda was even
Speaker 1: there that day? So she yes, she was there with Kappa.
Speaker 1: They traveled together. They apparently were inseparable when they were
Speaker 1: in Spain. So the information that I have found, it
Speaker 1: wasn't as if they said, hey, I'm gonna go here
Speaker 1: and you go there and let's meet up next week
Speaker 1: in this other town. No, they went everywhere together. Um,
Speaker 1: I think it was Hans name. It was talking about
Speaker 1: the fact like they ran out of cover at one
Speaker 1: point to watch a plane that had been shot down spiraling,
Speaker 1: and he was it was him or somebody else, just
Speaker 1: talking about like their general level of almost naivete about
Speaker 1: like oh this and that, and we're going to do
Speaker 1: this with our photos and like this just this general
Speaker 1: I mean would but remember he is a very very
Speaker 1: young man at this time, he is like twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: or twenty something like that. He's a very young guy.
Speaker 1: He was born in nineteen eighteen. This has happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's eighteen years old. Again, I would call that boldness
Speaker 1: not necessary, brazenness not necessarily like the immortality kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some of that, but there's also that sort of
Speaker 1: like this again just you know, knowing kind of what
Speaker 1: we know from like later interviews and things like that,
Speaker 1: of him thinking that he probably did think. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just like I could never die. It was like this
Speaker 1: is important and I should capture it, you know, And
Speaker 1: so that's I mean, that's hard. But he had this
Speaker 1: the is motto was amazing and fortunately it may have
Speaker 1: also been would cost him his life, which is if
Speaker 1: your photos aren't good enough, you're not close enough. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's why I don't think like Naveta. I think
Speaker 1: just like this, like I'm you know, you know, bracing
Speaker 1: this whatever we want to call it. But you know,
Speaker 1: I mean sometimes people are just obsessive about certain yeah,
Speaker 1: which is also fine, makes them sort of have a
Speaker 1: little bit of disregard for their safety. I was listening
Speaker 1: to uh interview with the NPR correspondent recently, and she said,
Speaker 1: you know, the really interesting thing about being a war
Speaker 1: correspondent is that I have this really bad behavior which
Speaker 1: is like kind of self destructive, and that it's like
Speaker 1: I go to Iran during the war and report on
Speaker 1: it while there's bombs dropping around me, and then I
Speaker 1: get a reward, which is an actual broadcasting award, and
Speaker 1: people are rewarding me for this. So my learned behavior
Speaker 1: is me doing this really dangerous, horrible thing is what
Speaker 1: makes me really good at my job. And I think
Speaker 1: that you know, that's kind of feeds into that as well. Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and you know the thing about war too, is
Speaker 1: that most of the bullets miss. Yeah, so your odds
Speaker 1: are actually most of them are as they do. Odds
Speaker 1: are you can run out there in the battlefield, you
Speaker 1: won't get shot. But I mean, I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I would agree, I don't know. I guess.
Speaker 1: We were kind of talking about my stupid theory that like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe he didn't actually take the pictures. I think he
Speaker 1: probably did. I just was kind of throwing that out there.
Speaker 1: I think that Robert Kappa took the photo and based
Speaker 1: on things that we're going to talk about. Sadly, I
Speaker 1: am very conflicted now because I think that he took
Speaker 1: the photo, but I think the circumstances are not what
Speaker 1: they were said to be, and we should probably talk
Speaker 1: about I think that's our second theory. I think it's
Speaker 1: okay to say either he or Greta definitely took the picture.
Speaker 1: Greta sorry, her original name was Greta, but she changed
Speaker 1: it to Grida anyway, Sorry. I think it's safe for us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's safe for us to say somebody that
Speaker 1: owned that brand took the picture. Okay, we'll go with that.
Speaker 1: So let's go the theory number two, which is indeed
Speaker 1: that the photo is a fake, and by fake, I
Speaker 1: mean it is not what it is portrayed. It was staged.
Speaker 1: So the process of faking photos, as Joe said, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean the process of taking photos of war, that
Speaker 1: happened as soon as people figured out how to take photographs,
Speaker 1: and right after that they figured out how to fake
Speaker 1: photos to get what the the to tell the story
Speaker 1: that they wanted to tell. They would manipulate the image
Speaker 1: in such a way so that it told their story
Speaker 1: and and it didn't matter what else how well it happens,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean it's like, for example, but imagine
Speaker 1: you're out in the battlefield and you see something really
Speaker 1: some really cool thing you've never seen before, like somebody
Speaker 1: getting shot and falling down to the ground. You think
Speaker 1: that's not cool obviously, but that would make a great shot.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately you didn't capture that shot. And so and it's
Speaker 1: a huge timing thing. If you want to catch somebody
Speaker 1: right in the act of getting shot, that's a big thing.
Speaker 1: And so I could see where at a certain point
Speaker 1: you would kind of give up on trying to actually
Speaker 1: capture that moment and just asking some soldiers slipping a
Speaker 1: few pace thos and say, dude, would you fall to
Speaker 1: the ground just like and and and and in a
Speaker 1: work correspondents mine, it's actually if he does it in
Speaker 1: such a way that it looks just like all these
Speaker 1: other guys that you've seen getting shot getting shot, it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I recreated the moment, you know, I wasn't
Speaker 1: able to capture it. And the act of staging photos
Speaker 1: was what a lot of photographers were forced to do
Speaker 1: during the Spanish Civil Wars, specifically because of the fact
Speaker 1: that the photographers were not allowed onto the front line,
Speaker 1: which makes sense, Yes they're not allowed, or else it's
Speaker 1: a timing thing. Like I said, So here's here's the crux,
Speaker 1: or here's the basis of the information. That really is
Speaker 1: throwing this theory forward at this point for a lot
Speaker 1: of people is that while Robert Kappa was in Sarah Mariano,
Speaker 1: he did take photos of refugees. Those refugees we talked
Speaker 1: about that Hans had gotten photos of, but at that
Speaker 1: point he had not yet taken the photo of the
Speaker 1: falling soldier. So basically the photos were out of order.
Speaker 1: When the print house developed them, they put them in
Speaker 1: the incorrect order, and instead he took that image a
Speaker 1: day or more later at it several days later at
Speaker 1: an entirely different location in a village called Espejo, which
Speaker 1: is about thirty miles or fifty kilometers south of where
Speaker 1: he supposedly was. And at that point when they got
Speaker 1: to that town, there was literally nothing happening because they
Speaker 1: had been you know, they on the fifth and the sixth,
Speaker 1: they were there, there's all this action. They say, we're
Speaker 1: going to go somewhere else, and they get to that
Speaker 1: somewhere else, which is a spago according to this theory,
Speaker 1: and nothing's going on. And at this point they say,
Speaker 1: well listen, we're bored. Um. They talked the local soldiers
Speaker 1: into running some maneuvers for them, because hey, you'll get
Speaker 1: your photo taken. And this is this is the days
Speaker 1: we're getting your photo taken. It's still a novel thing.
Speaker 1: So they run these exercises and if you look at
Speaker 1: the photos, there's images of the photographer, whoever the photographer is,
Speaker 1: whether it's Kappa or Taro, are in the trench and
Speaker 1: the soldiers are jumping over the trench and then they're
Speaker 1: bending over this this mound of dirt quote unquote firing
Speaker 1: at the enemy. They're running, they're doing all of these
Speaker 1: maneuvers and the action role playing, and they may have
Speaker 1: been doing that for the benefit of the camera. And
Speaker 1: at one point they said, hey, you know what, like
Speaker 1: Joe said, do you mind just running and getting quote
Speaker 1: unquote getting shot? Yeah, it's what soldiers like there and
Speaker 1: another soldiers going in Spanish, yes, yes, pew in Spanish. Whatever.
Speaker 1: That Okay, Well, but here's the thing is that if
Speaker 1: we look at the images that are taken at the
Speaker 1: same time as the falling soldier. There's some damning images
Speaker 1: because there's an image of a man laying on his
Speaker 1: back with his rifle across his chest. He appears to
Speaker 1: be deceased, but his arms are kind of folded over
Speaker 1: his chest, and that I'm laying here dead or something.
Speaker 1: There's also another man who is falling and appears to
Speaker 1: as if he is falling, almost as if he has
Speaker 1: been shot. And here's the hardest part about that. There's
Speaker 1: not a whole lot of other information in the photo
Speaker 1: of the ground appears to be rather recently cut wheat.
Speaker 1: But what you can see is the background. Off in
Speaker 1: the distance. You can see some mountains. You can see
Speaker 1: what looks like some tilled fields, and maybe a farmhouse.
Speaker 1: They're very very far and hard to see that maybe
Speaker 1: possibly could be a lake that's actually a field, that's
Speaker 1: actually a field. That's what the unfortunate thing, right that
Speaker 1: you're about to say is that, like the background of
Speaker 1: both of these images is almost identical. I lay them up.
Speaker 1: You to have seen this image that I put on,
Speaker 1: I've you know, my thing is I put stuff in
Speaker 1: the photoshop and I start toggling back and forth and
Speaker 1: the gifts of it and then I give you these
Speaker 1: gifts of these images flipping back and forth, and these
Speaker 1: images laid on top of each other are almost a
Speaker 1: perfect match, as if the images were taken almost all
Speaker 1: the exact same spot. It's almost, yeah, it's almost like
Speaker 1: somebody put a camera somewhere and was like, okay, actor
Speaker 1: one go, actor to go, act three go. Somebody did
Speaker 1: put it. It appears to me that the camera was
Speaker 1: not not on the same spot. It was on a tripod.
Speaker 1: It absolutely did not move. Yeah. Yeah. If you look
Speaker 1: at the you look at the borders and stuff, and
Speaker 1: then the features in the background, in the foreground and everything,
Speaker 1: it appears to me that it was on a tripod. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: but that's what I mean, like literally, like said, you know,
Speaker 1: a tripod because the falling soldier everything is in motion
Speaker 1: and it's hard to do on a tripod, whereas the
Speaker 1: second soldier is perfectly Chris. But either way, it was
Speaker 1: somebody standing there with a camera stationary going okay, all right,
Speaker 1: we got a line of soldiers. Now everybody's gonna fake
Speaker 1: being shot, all right, three? Yeah, who can do the
Speaker 1: best fake? Who can do it? And the cynical But
Speaker 1: the second soldier, the second soldier who appears to be
Speaker 1: falling down. He's very identifiable when you compare him to
Speaker 1: the falling soldier because where as a falling soldiers in
Speaker 1: a white shirt and light colored pants, this man is
Speaker 1: in what they call a boiler suit, basically a jump suit.
Speaker 1: And where is the falling soldier has his AMMO bags
Speaker 1: on his hip and the suspenders are going over his shoulders.
Speaker 1: This second guy in the boiler suit, his suspenders almost
Speaker 1: run up the center of his torso before wiring off
Speaker 1: over each shoulder. So very different. They looked different for
Speaker 1: holding their guns. Like, the thing that's really interesting about
Speaker 1: these photos is when when you were like, oh, I
Speaker 1: posted a gift before I had done any kind of
Speaker 1: reading or research on this, I was like, oh, there's
Speaker 1: the reel and the fake where I I thought the
Speaker 1: second one with the more identifiable one, I mean because
Speaker 1: his his fatigues look real worn in, looks like he's
Speaker 1: done some stuff. His body is just like crumpled, you know.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, the second soldier arm, the not
Speaker 1: famous one. Yeah, I was like, wow, that looks like
Speaker 1: human who just got shot and it's dead. And then
Speaker 1: the other one I was like, wow, that's a really
Speaker 1: clean outfit to bee. But I mean that was the
Speaker 1: interesting thing to me about this whole thing was that
Speaker 1: you posted these pictures and my immediate thought, here's the
Speaker 1: fake of yeah, and at least as you know, like
Speaker 1: somebody who knows historical fashion and things like that, was like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's the costume and there's the original. So here's the
Speaker 1: deal is that there's a there's a guy. His name
Speaker 1: is Jose Manuel so sparag We. I believe it's how
Speaker 1: you say. He's a university professor in Spain. And what
Speaker 1: he did is he took these two photos. He didn't
Speaker 1: take actually the falling man photo. He took the man
Speaker 1: laying prone and quote unquote shot and dead and the
Speaker 1: boiler suit man photo. And he sent those around two
Speaker 1: people in the area in Spain to try and identify
Speaker 1: the background. And that's how have this idea that it
Speaker 1: is probably in Espejo Is where the photo was taken.
Speaker 1: And the real big problem because these people are like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, no, I recognized this, and then they got
Speaker 1: ahold of locals who were you know, at this point,
Speaker 1: old men and women at that time, and said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: the fighting here there was early in September and it
Speaker 1: wasn't more fighting until the September. Will remember view ran
Speaker 1: the image on the twenty three September, so it can't
Speaker 1: be fighting in espeyho. That really makes a lot of
Speaker 1: problems then, because if it is that he took that
Speaker 1: in his spah, then it appears that there was no conflict,
Speaker 1: which appears that then it does lead a lot of
Speaker 1: credence to the idea that oh no, it was it
Speaker 1: was totally stage for the camera, or maybe maybe somebody
Speaker 1: just shot the guy wasn't even more related. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's that's actually we're going to get that into our
Speaker 1: next theory. And actually another theory that I like right
Speaker 1: now is that it didn't mean the stage somebody getting shot.
Speaker 1: He was actually going to take a portrait of the soldier.
Speaker 1: And he says back up a little bit, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Monty pythought, Oh yeah, no, um, And and listen, this
Speaker 1: is we've we've said this a couple of times, but
Speaker 1: it is this is not the first instance. If indeed
Speaker 1: this theory is true of somebody manipulating a photo. You
Speaker 1: guys probably have seen this photo YouTube in the room,
Speaker 1: but everybody else out there may have as well. There
Speaker 1: is a photo titled the Valley of the Shadow of
Speaker 1: Death by Roger Fenton. And what's that it's from? And
Speaker 1: it's this it's during um oh god, it's the Crimean War.
Speaker 1: And there's there's this road and there is cannonballs all
Speaker 1: up and down the sides of the road and all
Speaker 1: over the road owed itself, and it is just like,
Speaker 1: what the hell kind of crazy conflict took place here?
Speaker 1: And that is the photo that became very iconic until
Speaker 1: later on a sister photograph showed up which was the
Speaker 1: same scene from the same location, same angle, everything, except
Speaker 1: there was no cannonballs on the rolls in there. No
Speaker 1: they It turns out they took a lot of work
Speaker 1: for like a hundred years or hundred fifty years for
Speaker 1: people to figure this out. Photoshop is how they figured
Speaker 1: it out. The photographer did the second photo that no
Speaker 1: cannonballs on road photo, and then he and his assistants
Speaker 1: went out, wrapped cannonballs off of the side of the
Speaker 1: road and chucked them onto the road because the military
Speaker 1: is they're moving through had kicked all of the cannonballs
Speaker 1: out of the way because you can't do your you
Speaker 1: can't have your horses in your arts coming through with
Speaker 1: these balls away, so they pushed them into the ditches.
Speaker 1: They put them all back on the road or a
Speaker 1: bunch of them to then take this second photo that
Speaker 1: was obviously much more powerful because everybody, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: look at that right. Well, and actually that's totally out then,
Speaker 1: because the first balls were on the road because somebody
Speaker 1: put them there, and then the second ones were the
Speaker 1: Sunday put them there. You go. Uh. There's another actually
Speaker 1: really iconic photograph we've all seen, and it's been questioned
Speaker 1: for about fifty plus years now about whether it was
Speaker 1: stage or not, and that is the the famous photo
Speaker 1: of these this half a dozen Marines raising the flag
Speaker 1: on the El g in the Pacific World War two,
Speaker 1: and that was and and that one's pretty pretty certifiably
Speaker 1: absolutely not staged, but there were questions about it still
Speaker 1: for like understandingly, yeah, yeah, there's the there's the there's
Speaker 1: a famous photo of the here in Oregon, the Columbia
Speaker 1: River Gorge. This was back in the mid eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and there was a photographer god I can't remember his
Speaker 1: name now, but he was using these crazy monstrous plate
Speaker 1: cameras like twenty two by thirty inch play humongous things.
Speaker 1: I can't remember the guys. Yeah, I had it written
Speaker 1: down and then I moved it and I lost it.
Speaker 1: But anyway, he took this great image of the Columbia
Speaker 1: River gorge. But he took the first image and there
Speaker 1: was a tree in the middle of his photograph that
Speaker 1: he didn't like, so he went out, He left his
Speaker 1: camera where it was, he went up, he cut the
Speaker 1: tree down, and then he took the picture again. The
Speaker 1: second is what we all know, like, this is something
Speaker 1: that happened from day oh yeah, and I was just
Speaker 1: going to say that, like I guess from like a
Speaker 1: again historical fashion kind of climming standpoint. One of the
Speaker 1: first things I did when I saw this picture was like,
Speaker 1: all right, what did a Spanish Civil War uniform look like?
Speaker 1: If well, these guys were militia. They weren't actually enlisted soldiers,
Speaker 1: they were militia. So you if you see the photo,
Speaker 1: there's some of them that looked to be in uniform,
Speaker 1: and then there's a bunch of them that close they
Speaker 1: really weren't exactly to neat sides, Like certainly no, no,
Speaker 1: that's certainly true, But you know, like, what were the clothes,
Speaker 1: what were the general uniforms of people at that time,
Speaker 1: And that that's the other thing that's really hard to tell,
Speaker 1: is like I can't even tell what this image is
Speaker 1: supposed to be even representing. You know, the closest thing
Speaker 1: I can get is to a dude who's wearing this
Speaker 1: outfit but also with a cape and a fez. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like seriously, like you're laughing, but there's like that's
Speaker 1: the closest uniform that I can get to with it,
Speaker 1: and you know, and then all the other pictures are
Speaker 1: are of these fatigues that I would expect to see
Speaker 1: on a battlefield, especially in the trenches. And so that's like,
Speaker 1: I guess that's another thing that I tend to look at.
Speaker 1: I mean, whether that has married or not. Um, that's
Speaker 1: something that I tend to look at when we're kind
Speaker 1: of analyzing these historic things as well. Is you know,
Speaker 1: is somebody who's going to be really in the trenches.
Speaker 1: Is somebody who's honestly in the trenches getting shot in
Speaker 1: a war on the front lines going to have a
Speaker 1: totally untainted uniform on in all light colors. And that's
Speaker 1: one of those things that I guess and it's amazing
Speaker 1: they're all clean if he knows every but I mean,
Speaker 1: at least the like the other the like the following
Speaker 1: photo where we're safe from the same angle but it's
Speaker 1: in better view. But what his fatigues are darker there.
Speaker 1: They look like, you know, the pants are rolled up,
Speaker 1: the sleeves are rolled up. It looks worn. It looks
Speaker 1: real versus the other one, which is why I was
Speaker 1: immediately like, oh cool, there's like the real one and
Speaker 1: the stage one. But I mean, it looks like a
Speaker 1: muddy place that they're in, and the fact that his
Speaker 1: clothes are totally white. Crazy. I mean, that's crazy. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that it proves anything or doesn't prove anything,
Speaker 1: but it would be dusty. But it wouldn't be muddy,
Speaker 1: but it would be getting on their clone. It would
Speaker 1: be dirty. It wouldn't be this pristine quite because it
Speaker 1: looks like in he looks like he had his wash
Speaker 1: his shirt and then he ran up the hill right again. Though,
Speaker 1: like this isn't a definitive thing one way or the other,
Speaker 1: but that's something that always plays in my mind of
Speaker 1: looking at the close it could be like it makes
Speaker 1: it even more tragic. Is that he it was just
Speaker 1: his first day. He just oh, I am here, bang,
Speaker 1: and then he didn't have that time to go down. Well,
Speaker 1: he's in a lot of photo He's in at least
Speaker 1: four different images that I saw of Robert kappas from
Speaker 1: that day in that same series, So I think it's four.
Speaker 1: There's four of seven or eight of that a series
Speaker 1: are available, and he isn't at least two. I take
Speaker 1: that back. He's actually in two or three. He's not
Speaker 1: in every single one, but he's there in quite a
Speaker 1: few of them. But let's let's move. Let's move into
Speaker 1: the last theory that we have. This is a bit
Speaker 1: of an amalgamation of the the lat the theory that
Speaker 1: we've just been talking about, which is indeed the whole
Speaker 1: thing's started out as a fake and then it all
Speaker 1: got real. And by that, how this theory goes is
Speaker 1: that yes, Kappa and Gerda are they're they're getting the
Speaker 1: soldiers to run this maneuver form and show this stuff.
Speaker 1: What they don't realize is there is actually a small
Speaker 1: encampment of enemy soldiers nearby who as they watched them
Speaker 1: doing their maneuvers and running around and jumping over the
Speaker 1: trenches and firing into the distance, and YadA, YadA, YadA, think,
Speaker 1: what the hell, I why are they trying? I can't
Speaker 1: believe they know we're here and they're attacking us, and
Speaker 1: so they they fight back, and it's during one of
Speaker 1: these feigned runs that Kappa is shooting photographs of that
Speaker 1: the man in the falling Soldier image, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: we don't know who that man is to this day,
Speaker 1: but he is indeed hit by a bullet from an
Speaker 1: enemy that was, as yet until that point unknown to
Speaker 1: be in the area. Yeah. I kind of like that theory.
Speaker 1: That doesn't necessarily have to be like, oh, we were
Speaker 1: defending ourselves. It could be as simple as they had
Speaker 1: this kind of covert camp and you yeah, and they
Speaker 1: don't know, and then the guys are like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna run all these training exercises and they're like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is sniper fodder. The hard part is that there
Speaker 1: there is. So there's a couple of problems with that.
Speaker 1: One is that Kappa interview. He talks about machine gun fire.
Speaker 1: But for a man to be hit like that with
Speaker 1: a machine gun, you gotta be relatively close, So it
Speaker 1: can't be any kind of snipersh situation. Who's that guy?
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, I can't remember. I think it might have
Speaker 1: been like CNN or Fox or something. He was like
Speaker 1: a news reporter. He was like a big in a foxhole. No,
Speaker 1: he wasn't in a foxhole. He was like, oh, our
Speaker 1: helicopter was shocked William Yeah, yeah, yeah, and he was like, oh,
Speaker 1: we were shut down. I mean, this is this would
Speaker 1: not be the first time. This would not be the
Speaker 1: first time that somebody who was a journalist inflated the
Speaker 1: story behind an image, right, So, I mean, even if
Speaker 1: he was like it was drills and then this guy
Speaker 1: got shot down, he could have gone the extra step
Speaker 1: of saying, oh, and there was machine gun fire. It
Speaker 1: was awful. It was really dangerous. The thing I find weird, though,
Speaker 1: is that Kappa didn't seem to be particularly tight lipped
Speaker 1: about his stuff. He seemed to be a rather open
Speaker 1: talkative guy in general most of his stuff, and yet
Speaker 1: this particular one he didn't talk a lot about, which
Speaker 1: is that's the trick with lying. You know that, well,
Speaker 1: but that's what that's what makes people think that, well,
Speaker 1: maybe that's why it's a fake, is that he didn't
Speaker 1: want to talk about it because it was fake or
Speaker 1: I've always wondered, well, what about as you know, Joe
Speaker 1: made the joke earlier, was you know, somebody says pe
Speaker 1: pew as you run and you fall and you you die,
Speaker 1: and the first guy they go pup and the first
Speaker 1: the first guy in the boiler suit falls down and
Speaker 1: the second guy goes running and instead of going pup,
Speaker 1: somebody actually that does actually pull the triggers and kill
Speaker 1: the guy. And then you're like, I've just witnessed a
Speaker 1: true god murderer because it was an accident, but it
Speaker 1: was that was murderer, not necessarily murder. Could have been
Speaker 1: a gun accident as is. Yeah, it's it's friendly fire,
Speaker 1: which you don't want to tell the world that you
Speaker 1: got a famous photograph courtesy of friendly fire and nobody
Speaker 1: would talk about it. There's here's Here's let me finish
Speaker 1: is that here's the one really important thing in that
Speaker 1: area where all of this is supposed to have taken place.
Speaker 1: You know, it was never reported until the September casualties.
Speaker 1: Nobody was reported as having been killed in that entire time.
Speaker 1: So if it was friendly fire casualty, that's why you
Speaker 1: would cover that up. And that's all I was going
Speaker 1: to say was that, like, I I feel like this
Speaker 1: is kind of that like double blind thing, even though
Speaker 1: or like sometimes I was an expert liar as a child.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you so, like, well, we've been working with
Speaker 1: you for about five years now, we have figured out
Speaker 1: that you're an expert liar. So the thing you do
Speaker 1: is you convince yourself of a lie. Right, you come
Speaker 1: up with like, here's my backstory, and then you come
Speaker 1: up with your like okay, and then if this were
Speaker 1: my backstory, how would I react? And if if I
Speaker 1: were reacting that way, how would I pretend to be reacting? Right?
Speaker 1: Do you following me? And she was really scripting this out,
Speaker 1: but I guess, but no, I'm saying that, like okay,
Speaker 1: so that's how a good works. Well, that's I mean,
Speaker 1: And that may be like how Robert Kappa was working.
Speaker 1: Is that, like you know, he was like, all right,
Speaker 1: I staged all this stuff. This is great. Um, if
Speaker 1: I want to keep this story going, of this fake story,
Speaker 1: I have to act like it was real that this
Speaker 1: person got shot in front of me. And what does
Speaker 1: a person who saw somebody get shot in front of
Speaker 1: them acts like but I'm an outgoing person, so I
Speaker 1: should be normally talking about it. So what is the
Speaker 1: way that me, a normally talking about a person reacts
Speaker 1: to Oh yeah, right, So it's like that five deep
Speaker 1: lie of I don't get I get it. It's not good.
Speaker 1: I understand where you're going. It's not the best, it's
Speaker 1: not the worst. And that's the problem with this story, right,
Speaker 1: And that's yeah, that's the hard part. He said. He
Speaker 1: does so much stuff in his life, he is so
Speaker 1: willing to do. He seems to be so willing to
Speaker 1: talk about most things. This is the thing that really
Speaker 1: kind of put him on the map. And you would
Speaker 1: really hate to tell the world by the way, I
Speaker 1: know you love me now, but that first thing I did,
Speaker 1: that's totally a fake because that is that is not
Speaker 1: how Oprah got her start, and that would destroy the
Speaker 1: open Empire. She's like, oh, and by the way, that
Speaker 1: first season was totally fake. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you mean you can also say, like, but also at eighteen,
Speaker 1: I took a picture of a person being killed in
Speaker 1: front of me. I watched somebody die. It could be that,
Speaker 1: or it could be he was embarrassed because he didn't
Speaker 1: actually he didn't actually take the picture in a conscious way.
Speaker 1: He just stuck his camera, he sat up above the
Speaker 1: time and took a picture. He might have felt a
Speaker 1: little embarrassed about the fact that this is Sillier random
Speaker 1: things supposedly like his greatest picture ever, and it's also
Speaker 1: his most random, dumb luck picture ever. Do I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't give him any credit for it. If he
Speaker 1: actually did take that picture, it's a real picture. But
Speaker 1: I also wonder a little bit too if like there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of guilt there with Like, again, you said,
Speaker 1: this guy has never been identified. Yeah, you know, and
Speaker 1: there was there was a okay, so just so you know,
Speaker 1: for many, many years, there was a lot of talk
Speaker 1: that the falling Soldier was actually a famous Spanish revolutionary.
Speaker 1: It was then very exclusively proven and by the way,
Speaker 1: Magnum and Whalen and everybody's like, oh, yeah, it's going
Speaker 1: to be him because of this information, but it's very
Speaker 1: conclusively proven that he died somewhere else. Because here's the
Speaker 1: other problem is that if we look at the landscape,
Speaker 1: it looks like it's fields, but the battle that it
Speaker 1: is said to have taken place in is in more
Speaker 1: of a mountainous wooded area, and that guy was they
Speaker 1: found his body against a tree in a wooded space,
Speaker 1: like they know, they know it's not hill. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I guess I can also see the feeling of guilt
Speaker 1: of making your name on the death of somebody that
Speaker 1: you don't know. Yeah, you know, I'm the death of anybody.
Speaker 1: Of course, if you're a war correspondent, you know you
Speaker 1: probably have to be used to that by now. But
Speaker 1: if that was your first one at eighteen years old,
Speaker 1: like put yourself like at eighteen seeing somebody dying, taking
Speaker 1: a picture and suddenly because of that, but he's like
Speaker 1: the picture, it's like his camera up about the camera
Speaker 1: took a picture and he might not even have known
Speaker 1: for weeks that he even took that picture. For sure, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. I mean I think that that this is
Speaker 1: why this is the story that we're covering. Right, So
Speaker 1: there's so many different things. We haven't done this in
Speaker 1: a while, but I want to do this is I
Speaker 1: want to do a very quick round table four or
Speaker 1: five sentence reason. What do you think? What is your
Speaker 1: your preferred answer? Certain an answer, Okay, my preferred answer
Speaker 1: is that it probably was staged, and I don't totally
Speaker 1: blame him for doing it, because again, he probably at
Speaker 1: a certain point, you get frustrated, Like I said, you
Speaker 1: keep trying to catch that special little moment you never do.
Speaker 1: Finally you say screw it. You post for a picture
Speaker 1: so that I don't blame him, Okay, I don't. Okay,
Speaker 1: I you know, Unfortunately I agree. I do feel like
Speaker 1: it's staged. I hate that you're actually counting on your fingers,
Speaker 1: how many sentences I'm saying that was number three? I know,
Speaker 1: I know, I I think I think it was staged, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't. It's not real. It's just not it's not.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't. That's not to diminish the experiences that
Speaker 1: he had or the talents that he had, but it
Speaker 1: is just to say that this particular photo was fake,
Speaker 1: like his name and his wife's name or lover yeah,
Speaker 1: his girlfriend. Yeah, no, I I feel like it. I
Speaker 1: also agree that I think that it was a stage photo.
Speaker 1: And it kills me to say that because as did
Speaker 1: you guys watch any of the documentaries on him, Did
Speaker 1: you get a chance to do that the outside of
Speaker 1: the specific topic. You know, it's one of those things
Speaker 1: you do when I mean we ask, oh, did you
Speaker 1: watch this completely? I've been watching documentaries on the man
Speaker 1: and his imagery, Like I saw it it first, he's talented.
Speaker 1: I don't. First I did amazing of things that he saw,
Speaker 1: likes with a lot of photographers, so I wanted to
Speaker 1: be real. And I see all of the body of
Speaker 1: he had seven hundred seventy or seven hundred thousand images
Speaker 1: he left behind like it is an amazing breadth of work,
Speaker 1: and I hate to think that it was all leveraged
Speaker 1: off of a falsification, but I cannot say that. I
Speaker 1: feel that it wasn't anymore. By the way, if you
Speaker 1: go out there, there's a two thousand three documentary made
Speaker 1: on it. Please somebody find an original copy of that
Speaker 1: and put it on the internet, because there is one
Speaker 1: on YouTube that is great. It's like an hour and
Speaker 1: twenty seven minutes long, but some jackass has hacked it
Speaker 1: up and spliced it out of order, and so it's
Speaker 1: like forty five minutes and then it jumps around like
Speaker 1: it's confusing. Realistically, that's probably the way that they've gotten
Speaker 1: past issue. I know, but it's still get to download
Speaker 1: and but is it. Well, here's what I'll say is
Speaker 1: that he would not be the first artist ever to
Speaker 1: make his name on a Baker Forture war correspondence. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and there's like genuinely historic. I mean, like we talked
Speaker 1: about Thomas Edison, super famous dude who stole literally everything
Speaker 1: that he ever did, right, I mean, I don't think
Speaker 1: that it takes away from his talent, but but he's
Speaker 1: incredibly talented. But unfortunately, but it is an unfortunate start
Speaker 1: we now know, but I have not stopped. It could
Speaker 1: have been actually a very auspicious start because maybe his
Speaker 1: reasoning was and I could sort of see this. It's like,
Speaker 1: I really want to be able to go out and
Speaker 1: do this, take all these pictures so everybody around the
Speaker 1: world can see what's going on out here in the battlefield.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, I really can't afford to do it. I've
Speaker 1: got to go out there and I've got to take
Speaker 1: some killer picture that will put me on a map,
Speaker 1: and then I'll get those higher fees and then and
Speaker 1: and that I'll be able to do this. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: and without that, I mean, he was the only photographer
Speaker 1: on Omaha Beach on the day. We wouldn't have those images.
Speaker 1: There's images from when he uh, the the year that
Speaker 1: he died, when he was into the Indo China War.
Speaker 1: I mean I stopped, I paused the video. I looked
Speaker 1: at it. It is beautiful with soldiers walking line, there's tank,
Speaker 1: there's dust of sunset. This is all in black and white.
Speaker 1: Remember there's no color, and it is image. He did
Speaker 1: a fantastic job, and I would recommend that everybody go
Speaker 1: out and look at Kappa's work. We will, of course
Speaker 1: have the image of the falling soldier on the website.
Speaker 1: I will also put up as a secondary link the
Speaker 1: comparison photo that I've made, the animated gift that is
Speaker 1: rotating so you can see them overlaid on each other,
Speaker 1: because it really helps explain what we've talked about so far.
Speaker 1: That is all going to be on our website, which
Speaker 1: is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. There'll be a couple
Speaker 1: of other search links on there as always, and then
Speaker 1: you can listen to and download the episode from there.
Speaker 1: On the website, you're also going to find the episode
Speaker 1: list as a separate page, and then you'll also find
Speaker 1: links to merchandise so hats, mugs, coffee cups, sob shirts,
Speaker 1: all that no hats, actually no hats, shirts and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Don't have a hat because embroidery
Speaker 1: is expensive, it turns out, so that stuff is all
Speaker 1: on the website. Now, if you don't want to just
Speaker 1: listen to and download through the website, you can always
Speaker 1: go to any of the streaming services. So if you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts through Apple, you can go ahead and
Speaker 1: subscribe and leave us a rating. We appreciate that and
Speaker 1: that helps others find us. We're also in other streaming services,
Speaker 1: so are good friends at Stitcher have us, so you
Speaker 1: can always find us on Stitcher. We are all over
Speaker 1: social media, so we have the Facebook page and the
Speaker 1: Facebook groups of the pages where we put episodes and
Speaker 1: other fun stuff, and then the group is where the
Speaker 1: episode discussions will happen. There's also episode discussions that happened
Speaker 1: on our subreddit, so you can look that up. And
Speaker 1: then we have a couple other places. We have Twitter
Speaker 1: where there's some conversations and fun stuff going, and then
Speaker 1: Instagram were putting other weird funds. There's all kinds of fun,
Speaker 1: weird stuff coming from thinking. You can connect with all
Speaker 1: of us. Absolutely. Remember on Instagram, it is not thinking
Speaker 1: sideways is thinking Sideways Podcast thanks to it from our
Speaker 1: Facebook or our website, you get to the right spot.
Speaker 1: And of course if you questions, comments, stories, you want
Speaker 1: to suggest, you can reach out and give those two
Speaker 1: us directly through our email, which is Thinking Sideways Podcast
Speaker 1: at gmail dot com. It takes us a little bit
Speaker 1: these days to get back, but we're always trying to
Speaker 1: get back to people as quickly as we can, so
Speaker 1: if it doesn't happen on day one, I apologize, but
Speaker 1: we're doing our best. That thing is always full. It's
Speaker 1: literally us three, literally responding to everything. We don't have
Speaker 1: still to get me turn all right, we should call
Speaker 1: Justin again. Yeah, podcast doesn't do anything. I think. That
Speaker 1: is all that I have to say about this particular mystery.
Speaker 1: It's all laid out there in black and white. So
Speaker 1: we will talk to you guys next week, fake but real.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry for the successfully nerdy episode.