[E.O.M.S.]

It’s a rare picture that encompasses an era; even the most justly famous photographs very rarely manage the feat. Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square,” for instance, perfectly illustrated the rapturous mood of a nation - and much of the world - at the end of the Second World War, but no one would argue that the image somehow captured the five-year war itself. Bill Eppridge’s haunting picture of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen in June 1968 distilled the darkest, most murderous currents of the Age of Aquarius, but no one says of that one photograph, “That was the Sixties.”
So, yes, it’s phenomenally rare for a single photo to evoke both a discrete moment, and an entire epoch. But that is exactly what Robert Capa’s now-iconic “Falling Soldier” manages to do; there, in one frame, made at the very moment a Loyalist fighter in Spain is shot and killed, one encounters a distillation of the Fascist violence and the brutally extinguished Republican sense of hope - hope for a new, free, egalitarian society - that ultimately came to define the Spanish Civil War...
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