The Capa Series or Commitment: the Fallen Artist was a response to the Spanish Civil War, but especially the idealism and courage of the International Brigades — artists, writers, union activists and doctors among others — who traveled to Spain with no government support in order to help stop the fascists from taking control. I had met several of these individuals, still living and full of war stories, in New York in the 1980s. This project was however, also a comment, somewhat contradictorily, about the loss of idealism I felt in the mid-1990s, especially among artists. The work itself consisted of a photographed model re-creating the “fallen soldier”Robert Capa made famous in his well-known photograph, plus several oval and square frames that looked like they were made of slick, blue-white ice. Some of the photo-panels included text-excerpts from Georges Bataille’s short story ‘Blue of Noon” and from an self-published oral history written by a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I also hoped that those familiar with the Spanish Civil War would relate to the combination of sentimental and romantic feeling towards that conflict the work invokes, while simultaneously having that idealism complicating through references to frozen landscapes and all too human frailties.

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