The show is good at conveying how exciting--indeed, how revolutionary--Capa's battle photos were. Capa wasn't a witness to war so much as a visual participant in it; he conceived of his photos as intervention, not art. That we, now, consider these photographs to be more than "just news" is due in part to Capa's phenomenal eye. From the beginning of his career, Capa was a genius at capturing the dramatic moment of decision, the seemingly tiny detail that could suggest a much larger world, and the narrative drive that the best pictures encapsulate. Armed with his lightweight Leica and his apparently utter lack of fear, he plunged his viewers into the heart of battle in ways that now seem iconic but at the time were radically new: unsettling, nerve-wracking, terrifying. Capa's photographs were closer, faster, denser than any that had been seen before: these were photographs taken by a partisan in the thick of battle, not an observer of it. The ICP, rightly, showcases some of Capa's pictures as they appeared in magazines and papers: we see how these images zipped around the world, published by everyone from the reactionary Henry Luce in New York to Communist editors in Paris. And regardless of ideological affiliation, such publications weren't shy about touting the sheer drama of Capa's pictures. Regards, staunchly left-wing, promised "des documents sensationnels," while Life boasted: Life's Camera Gets Closer to Spanish War Than Any Camera Has Ever Got Before.

Capa's photos, especially those from Spain, had a moral and political impact that may be hard for us to conjure, living as we do in a picture-glutted, horror-glutted age. Spain--the way it was documented, the way it was fought, the why it was fought--was freighted with meanings, and with a kind of exigent participation, that other wars were not: Capa's viewers weren't simply regarding the pain of others. We approach war photographs with a weird combination of guilty voyeurism, apathy and helplessness; Capa's contemporaries didn't. As the media historian Caroline Brothers has written, "With seemingly everyone from writers to politicians to the Liverpudlian unemployed taking sides over Spain, the civil war took on an unprecedented urgency in the way it was lived and believed in and represented. More than in any previous war and possibly any war since, photographs of Spain became images not just of but in conflict. And none of them was indifferent."

Capa's audiences for his Spanish Civil War pictures lived just before the avalanche: of history, of images, of mass death. We postmoderns are more cynical than they; and we tend to mistake our weariness for wisdom.

In 1938 Capa published a book called Death in the Making, which he hoped would mobilize international support for the Spanish Republic. He wrote the book and illustrated it with photographs of his own and of Taro's. His dedication read: "For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front, and who stayed on."

Those who stayed on--both the dead and the living--are the subject of Francesc Torres's installation, Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep, and his accompanying book. Torres, a conceptual artist whose works often address the confluence of memory, history and politics, co-curated the 2004 Barcelona exhibit "At War," an immense, ambitious show of photographs, paintings and other artifacts that depict modern war as a cultural and social experience. Torres was born in 1948 in Barcelona--"across the street from a brothel," he notes--and is also, I learned in conversation with him, the grandson of a man who spent a decade in jail as a political prisoner of Franco.

Torres's installation documents the excavation, in 2004, of a mass grave near the town of Villamayor de los Montes. (He had previously attempted similar projects in other venues but was always blocked, he says, for political reasons, even by governments of the left.) It was there, on the night of September 14, 1936, that forty-six civilian supporters of the Republic--all male, and ranging in age from 18 to 61--were murdered, execution-style, by fascist paramilitias and then dumped, along with their belongings, into the grave. Torres worked with the excavation team--anthropologists, archaeologists, forensic specialists and members of the Association for the Recuperation of the Historical Memory--as it dug up and painstakingly identified each victim; two years later, the town gathered to give each man a proper burial. Many of the victims' descendants are now older than their relatives were when they were killed. There are brothers on the victims' list, and a father and his sons, and the terrible question emerges: who watched whom die? Torres's work evokes not just the injustice and sudden cruelty of these deaths but how drenched in sorrow they were and are.

The installation includes twenty-nine huge (approximately 6 by 10 feet) matte black-and-white digitally printed photos. The size of the photos is arresting: one's first impression is of slight shock. But the prints, all unframed, are stuck onto the wall with pushpins, as if these are someone's snapshots, though of a particularly sad and grisly kind. We see skulls that look as if they're screaming, and piles of bones. But even more powerful are images of the personal, prosaic things--a comb encrusted with dirt, a pair of eyeglasses--that the victims carried to their death. Torres presents us with just one such item: a watch found on one of the men, which the artist displays carefully, almost reverentially, under glass. It is elegant, and stained, and undeniably beautiful, but it has no hands: time, Torres seems to suggest, was not merely stopped by Franco but actually erased. The excavation, then, is less an attempt to retrieve old memories that have been lost than to create new ones in a place where they had been forbidden. This, at the very least, is what we owe the dead.

"I foolishly insist on winning the Spanish Civil War," Torres's text announces as a visitor enters the installation. It's a statement that made me laugh, though with admiration, at its sheer, counterintuitive audacity. What would it mean to turn such a defeat into its opposite--to create "the negation of the negation," as the Holocaust survivor Jean Améry once wrote?

We start, Torres seems to say, by distinguishing between perpetrators and victims, and with our remembrance of the latter. But this remembrance is of a particularly sober kind. It has nothing to do with glorious warriors who died unvanquished, or with exultant martyrs making a beeline for heaven, or with false promises of "Never Again!" Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep is quieter, humbler, than all that; and bleaker, too, for it rejects both consolation and revenge. It is constructed in praise not of famous men but, rather, of the ordinary ones--and their descendants--who had a vision of a better, more capacious, more human Spain, and whose cries for international solidarity went largely unheard.

I think--though who can be sure?--that Taro and Capa would have shared Torres's vision had they lived long enough to see a democratic Spain. For to look at their work--so long ago, and yet so very recent--is to see the citizens of Villamayor de los Montes: then and now, dead and living, forgotten and honored, betrayed and hopeful, vanquished and free. It is to see those who perished, and those who persevered.

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