There Are No Black-and-White Answers in War -- Then Lost Negatives Turn Up

Curator Brian Wallis inspects long-lost negatives, which may show whether Robert Capa's most famous Spanish Civil War photo was staged. (By Kathy Williens -- Associated Press)

The files had been missing since 1939, when Capa, then 25, fled Paris for the United States. Although the Nazi invasion of France was still a year away, the man born in Hungary as Endre Friedmann, and known for his ardent communist sympathies, was already persona non grata in France.

In his haste to depart, Capa left the film and other contents of his Paris office and darkroom in the care of a lab assistant, Imre Weisz, who also was preparing to escape.

Hoping to reach Mexico as a refugee, Weisz fled with the boxes of negatives to Marseilles, where he gave the collection to Aguilar Gonzalez, a Mexican consular official and former general, for safekeeping. The aide wound up as a war prisoner of the pro-German Vichy French regime, and for decades the film was assumed to have been lost during World War II.

But in the mid-1990s, the cache of negatives was rediscovered in Mexico City, owned by relatives of Gonzalez. After lengthy negotiations with a Mexico-based filmmaker named Benjamin Tarver, a grandnephew of Gonzalez, the family recently gave the archive to the Capa estate through his brother Cornell, now 89 and director emeritus of the photo center he founded.

The archive contains not only Capa's negatives but others by his German-born lover and business manager, Gerda Taro, and David "Chim" Seymour, who later became a founding partner with Capa and others of the Magnum photo agency.

But it is the photography of Capa that dominates this "extraordinarily significant" collection, Wallis said.

"Capa came to stand for the very truthfulness of war photography," he said. "He was not only in the heat of the action but right up there next to the guys when the bullets were flying."