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atmosphere, a darkness, barely sketched in. War is not a spectacle. And Goya’s print series is not a narrative: each image, captioned with a brief phrase lamenting the wickedness of the invaders and the monstrousness of the suffering they inflicted, stands independently of the others. The cumulative effect is devastating.
    The ghoulish cruelties in The Disasters of War are meant to awaken, shock, wound the viewer. Goya’s art, like Dostoyevsky’s, seems a turning point in the history of moral feelings and of sorrow—as deep, as original, as demanding. With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art. (And new subjects for fellow-feeling: as in, for example, his painting of an injured laborer being carried away from a building site.) The account of war’s cruelties is fashioned as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer. The expressive phrases in script below each image comment on the provocation. While the image, like every image, is an invitation to look, the caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just that. A voice, presumably the artist’s, badgers the viewer: can you bear to look at this? One caption declares: One can’t look ( No se puede mirar ). Another says: This is bad ( Esto es malo ). Another retorts: This is worse ( Esto es peor ). Another shouts: This is the worst! ( Esto es lo peor! ). Another declaims: Barbarians! ( Bárbaros! ). What madness! ( Que locura! ), cries another. And another: This is too much! ( Fuerte cosa es! ). And another: Why? ( Por qué? ).
    The caption of a photograph is traditionally neutral informative: a date, a place, names. A reconnaissance photograph from the First World War (the first war in which cameras were used extensively for military intelligence) was unlikely to be captioned “Can’t wait to overrun this!” or the X-ray of a multiple fracture to be annotated “Patient will probably have a limp!” Nor should there be a need to speak for the photograph in the photographer’s voice, offering assurances of the image’s veracity, as Goya does in The Disasters of War, writing beneath one image: I saw this ( Yo lo ví ). And beneath another: This is the truth ( Esto es lo verdadero ). Of course the photographer saw it. And unless there’s been some tampering or misrepresenting, it is the truth.
    Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya’s and photographs by the convention that artists “make” drawings and paintings while photographers “take” photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. Moreover, fiddling with pictures long antedates the era of digital photography and Photoshop manipulations: it has always been possible for a photograph to misrepresent. A painting or drawing is judged a fake when it turns out not to be by the artist to whom it had been attributed. A photograph—or a filmed document available on television or the internet—is judged a fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it purports to depict.
    That the atrocities perpetrated by the French soldiers in Spain didn’t happen exactly as pictured—say, that the victim didn’t look just so, that it didn’t happen next to a tree—hardly disqualifies The Disasters of War. Goya’s images are a synthesis. They claim: things like this happened. In contrast, a single photograph or filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’s lens. A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what? The suspicion that Capa’s “Death of a Republican Soldier”—titled “The Falling Soldier” in the authoritative compilation of Capa’s