WARNING - This post links to some graphic images of human bodies.

It is certainly true that many early post-combat photos were staged, and it is also true that very nearly all images and films claiming to show actual combat were also staged up to the end of World War I – but there are also some post-combat and even combat images produced before 1918 images that are generally accepted to show the real, unstaged, battles and the aftermath of battles.

The earliest "war photography" dates to the 1847 Mexican American War and to 1848 and the Second Sikh War, in northern India. Here is the earliest war-related photo I'm aware of – it is a daugerreotype and shows General John Wool and some of his troops in the streets of the Mexican town of Saltillo in 1847. You can read a fairly detailed analysis of this image and its significance here in the book Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News.

Early war-related photography mostly consists of portraits of participants rather than combat or post-combat imagery for the very good reason that contemporary cameras were bulky and required long exposure times; in addition, photos of dead bodies were often considered rather horrifying and bad for morale. The best known early war photographer was probably Roger Fenton, whose images of the Crimean War (between Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire, and Russia in the early 1850s) became famous. A fine gallery of his surviving prints – showing locales, personalities, and troops, but not combat or post combat images, can be found here. But there do exist "atrocity" photographs associated with the Indian rebellion against British rule of 1857-8. Probably the most famous of these is a notoriously "posed" image taken at the Secundra Beg, in Lucknow, scene of an especially brutal siege and massacre of British families. In revenge, the British executed 2000 Indian troops, buried their own dead, but left their enemies' remains to rot. Most appear to have been subsequently interred by their countrymen. A photographer named Felice Beato reached the scene four or five months later, in spring 1858, and, according to the memoirs of Sir George Campbell, had some of the rebel bodies disinterred and arranged in a courtyard for dramatic effect.

Matters had improved by the time the American Civil War broke out, and the conflict was widely covered. In addition to the work of Brady, we also need to be aware of his one-time assistant, Alexander Gardner, who probably exposed more photos of the conflict than anybody else. It was Gardner who made numerous images of the Confederate dead after the Battle of Antietam in 1862, including a mass of dead soldiers piled in what became known as "Bloody Lane." (His other very well known work shows the execution of four of the conspirators who had plotted the Lincoln assassination in 1865).

Gardner's photos were exhibited in New York in the same year, leading the New York Times to write that " If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards . . . he has done something very like it." So far as we know, these images were not posed or re-staged. But Gardner is now known to have adjusted the scene when he took photos in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, notably one famous image showing the body of a Confederate sniper. His work was analysed by the historian William Frassanito in his Early Photography at Gettysburg, and Frassanito noted that the same dead body appeared in two different locations in the Gettysburg series. Apparently Gardner and his assistants had considered it especially photogenic and had put it on a blanket and hauled it between the two sites, setting up the latter photo by positioning the dead man's head towards the camera and adding a rifle laid next to him. Frassanito notes that Gardner thought of himself as an artist and would not have considered his actions to be "faking".

You mention Robert Capa. I suspect the discussion here relates to the famous photo known as "The falling soldier" that he took in 1936 - see it here – and which is claimed to show the moment of death of a Republican soldier called Frederico Borrell García during the Spanish Civil War. Doubts have been raised over its authenticity, based partly on discrepancies between what the photo shows and Capa's description of the events surrounding it. These were summarised by the New York Times here but the issue has never been conclusively resolved; the image remains controversial. The sceptical view is that the image was faked at a location some distance behind the front line for propaganda purposes.

This has been a rather grim and heavyweight post, so to close I'll give a rather more amusing anecdote of early faking, this time associated with early film-makers. I wrote about this in more detail – including a study of the well known story that the Mexican rebel Pancho Villa signed a contract with a Hollywood studio to fight his war to the studio's timetable, and for its cameras, in a (warning: very long) post here. The story is told by the English cinematographer George Villiers, who was attempting to cover the Turco-Greek War of 1897. When Villiers

arrived at his base at Volos, in Thessaly, trailing his cinematograph and a bicycle on which to get about, he discovered he was the only cameraman covering the war. According to his own accounts, at least, he was able to get some real long-distance shots of the fighting, but yearned to obtain something more visceral, and obtained what he required in typically resourceful fashion, passing through the Turkish lines to secure a private interview with the Ottoman governor, Enver Bay, who granted him a safe passage to Athens:

Not content with this, Villiers asked the governor for confidential information: “I want to know when and where the next fight will take place. You Turks will take the initiative, for the Greeks can now only be on the defensive.” Not surprisingly, Enver Bey was staggered by his request. Looking at Villiers steadily, he said at last: “You are an Englishman and I can trust you. I will tell you this: Take this steamer… to the port of Domokos, and don’t fail to be at the latter place by Monday noon.”

Armed with this exclusive information, Villiers’s record of the war continues, he arrived at Domokos “on the exact day and hour to hear the first gun fired by the Greeks at the Moslem infantry advancing across the Pharsala plains.” Some battle scenes were shot. Since the photographer remained uncharacteristically modest about the precise results of all his labours, however, we may reasonably conclude that whatever footage he was able to obtain showed little if any of the action. That seems to be implicit in one revealing fragment that does survive: Villiers’s own outraged account of how he found himself scooped by an enterprising rival who had apparently ventured no closer to the front than Dover.

The images were accurate, but they lacked cinematic appeal. When he got back to England, he realised that his footage was worth very little in the film market. One day a friend told him that he had seen some wonderful pictures of the Greek war the previous evening. Villiers was surprised since he knew for certain that he had been the only cameraman filming the war. He soon realised from his friend’s account that these were not his pictures.

‘Three Albanians [then part of the Ottoman army] came along a very white dusty road toward a cottage on the right of the screen. As they neared it they opened fire; you could see the bullets strike the stucco of he building. then one of the Turks with the butt end of his rifle smashed in the door of the cottage, entered and brought out a lovely Athenian maid in his arms… Presently an old man, evidently the girl’s father, rushed out of the house to her rescue, when the second Albanian whipped out his yataghan from his belt and cut the old gentleman’s head off! Here my friend grew enthusiastic. ‘There was the head,’ said he, ‘rolling in the foreground of the picture. Nothing could be more positive than that.’