This is a good point but there is difference between staging your example illustrates, and staging that is involved in photographs in which pretence plays a role( think of actors pretending to be soldiers landing on the same beach ).

Capa’s photograph is ‘authentic’ in a sense that it is transparent i.e. looking at such shots , one sees the actual event in the same way one sees things in a mirror or through a telescope( wee see the actual landing through the photograph as Ken Walton would say).

With a staged landing or a staged execution, things work differently : such photos are not photos of a beach landing or an execution any more than a photograph of an actor who looks like Tony Blair is a photo of Tony Blair.

That there is this deeper difference between staged and “authentic” photos is shown by the fact that staged photos are not counterfactually dependent on the images they represent whereas non staged photos are. That is to say had there been an explosion where Capa was pointing his camera his photo would show depict it. But this does not happen with staged photos.

A historian of photography would know the answer.

joel,
The Bradley book makes the point that the truth is complicated, and it can be hard, but not impossible, to know a sequence of events. In no way do I think the photographs of the two flag raisings on Iwo Jima were “staged” with the implication of artificiality or falseness. The marines posed in front of the flag in a couple of the shots, the way people do, but the famous image was not even posed, but rather luck of Rosenthal’s part.

I’m not looking to trash Rosenthal, just to say: that iconic image was controversial from the start—in many of the ways that are being talked about here.

joel turnipseed, I’m referring to the Bradley book, not the movie, and am not understanding your point. The marines on Iwo Jima were not raising the flag for a photograph, they were photographed raising a flag. Of course the flag was a public gesture, sure to be photographed, and of the several photos taken of both flag raising, the most “artistic” looking shot has survived in the public mind.

Morris makes an excellent point that “photo faking” is a common assumption, that often isn’t true. Alexander Gardner “enhanced” photos of Civil War dead by adding a prop musket to the corpse. But it has been stated that he actually tugged and dragged corpses about to improve a scene’s composition, something I think there is little evidence for at all.
“Flags of Our Fathers” dealt exhaustively with the Iwo Jima flag raising photo, and the persistent myth that somehow it was staged, and therefore less real.
It all goes back to photography’s dual roles as reality recorder and artistic endeavor.

I’m partly still spell-bound by the two Morris essays (quick: blog post as essay—invent new word for it), but also partly holding back until he finishes his third post until I say much about it (cheap excuse, I know).

Meantime, I noticed that Ken Burns used a great film trick from John Huston in his The War: cutting very nearly identical shots so that it looks like a soldier is disintegrated by an artillery blast. Now, in all actuality, if it was an 88 shell and it hit where you were running, it probably would come close to doing just that: but how many combat cameramen were around to capture this exact scene? I’m working on a post using the Huston scene—it’s amazing. Even though it’s fake, it’s one of the truest video representations of war.

Finally, in the “ambiguity of photos/film” department: anyone else here paying attention to the Haditha trials? Looks like the Marines are going to face reduced charges (though: negligent manslaughter is nothing to sneeze at), in part because of the difficulty of interpreting evidence (if you’ve forgotten: the whole trial came to light because of a video shot on the scene).