Witness to woes of war

'If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough,' war photographer Robert Capa once said. Just how close Capa got is made clear in This Is War!, an exhibition of his work at New York's International Centre of Photography. Pictures from the Spanish civil war, the Sino-Japanese war and the second world war feature scenes from the heart of the fighting.

Capa's photographs brought the horrific reality of war home to readers of news weeklies such as Picture Post, Life, and Vu - pictorial magazines that ushered in the golden age of photojournalism.

One of the best-known results of his fearless approach is The Falling Soldier, which forms the centrepiece of the show. The picture, shot in 1936, shows a Republican soldier killed by a fascist bullet during the Spanish civil war. Capa was standing in front of the victim when the shot was fired. The photo was widely published at the time and became a symbol of the Spanish Republic's heroic resistance to Franco's German-backed fascists.

'The picture seemed to symbolise Republican Spain itself, chugging forward, then being struck down,' note the show's curators, Cynthia Young and the late Richard Whelan.

Also on show are photos from one of Capa's lesser-known adventures, in China. In 1938, Capa travelled to the country to work as second cameraman on a documentary film about the Sino-Japanese war. While on the mainland, he took photos for Life.

Even back then, the Chinese leadership's attitude towards the foreign press was restrictive. Capa was accustomed to roaming around battlefields in Spain as he pleased - but he couldn't do that in China. He had been invited by the Kuomintang, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek placed many restrictions on the filmmakers. According to the curators, she even assigned a high-ranking military official to control their movements, attempting to ensure a favourable portrayal of China.