Word: viet
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Call up Eddie Adams' 1968 photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the police chief of Saigon, firing his snub-nosed revolver into the temple of a Viet Cong officer. Bright sunlight, Saigon: the scrawny police chief's arm, outstretched, goes by extension through the trigger finger into the V.C.'s brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait...
Adams has always felt uncomfortable about his picture of Loan executing the Viet Cong officer. What the picture does not show is that a few moments earlier the Viet Cong had slaughtered the family of Loan's best friend in a house just up the road. All this occurred during the Tet offensive, a state of general mayhem all over South Viet Nam. The Communists in similar circumstances would not have had qualms about summary execution...
...firing around the world and lodged in the conscience. Photography is the very dream of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which holds that the act of observing a physical event inevitably changes it. War is merciless, bloody, and by definition it occurs outside the orbit of due process. Loan's Viet Cong did not have a trial. He did have a photographer. The photographer's picture took on a life of its own and changed history...
...television. On the Viet Nam battle field, news photography finally ceded immediacy to its rival. Could picture taking, no longer history's first witness, ever again be more than stenography? Eddie Adams, Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin and Larry Burrows, among others, answered yes, as they found the war's significance in the interstitial details: the fear in a Vietnamese prisoner's eyes, the deathly immobility of a wounded U.S. soldier...
...staple of TIME and Newsweek, which had moved into the void left by the collapsing picture magazines. For many traditionalists, color marked a final capitulation to the values of television. But a group of younger photojournalists would begin to paint the news in bold colors. Like the U.S. after Viet Nam, these new practitioners were no longer satisfied by the old certainties...