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THE ARTS/BOOKS | JANUARY 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4 |
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Courage Close Up A new book pays tribute to the photographers who died covering the French Indochina and Vietnam Wars By HELEN GIBSON /LONDON
No photographer could be a "Saigon warrior," the disdainful name applied to the print journalists who wrote of the war from comfortable hotels and military briefings in the capital. But some cameramen and women took extraordinary risks, year in and year out, on the battlefields and landing zones. Many paid with their lives, a distinction with peculiar relevance to this volume. "If I put together an exhibition of the living photographers' works, it would not be better than this," says Associated Press senior European photo editor Horst Faas, a Pulitzer prize-winning Vietnam photographer who compiled Requiem with another surviving photographer, the oft-wounded Tim Page. "These pictures have a message I cannot find in the pictures of those who survived." Common to them all, he says, is that they are not posed and--in keeping with Capa's definition of good photographs--they are in close. Requiem's posthumous contributors range from such iconic figures as Capa and Larry Burrows to adventurers like the glamorous Sean Flynn, son of film star Errol Flynn, and the lesser-known Henri Huet. It is Huet's pictures, however, that dominate. Half-French, half-Vietnamese, the quiet Huet was constantly in the field, shooting photos of soldiers in the front line that were often tender and full of compassion. He was always in close: in one typical frame his camera is just behind two American infrantrymen belly-crawling through thick mud, firing from behind three dead soldiers for cover. What is more remarkable about Requiem is that not all the pictures were taken from Huet's side of the line. Many were made by photographers assigned to combat units with the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army, who were expected to shoot with rifles as well as cameras. Like combat soldiers, they learned to dismantle their cameras while blindfolded and to make their own replacement parts. The lives of these men and women were often short, the conditions grueling. There were no financial bonuses nor the satisfaction of having a picture appear on the cover of TIME or LIFE. Yet if Tran Binh Khuol's photos of a group of tense V.C. guerrillas preparing an attack on a South Vietnamese outpost are not technically as good as Huet's, they are electric in atmosphere. Faas and Page found that the authorities in Hanoi were happy to open their archives of war negatives. The two editors pored over some 10,000 photographs from both sides, many of them never before published, others famed images that still define the war. Some, poignantly, were the photographers' last pictures, such as Capa's of French troops sweeping through fields in northern Vietnam, shot a few hours before he was killed by a mine. Even more poignant was Huet's picture of a marine chaplain administering the last rites to photographer Dickey Chapelle, after shrapnel had torn open her carotid artery. The book follows the conflict through a quarter-century, starting with lyrical 1950s landscapes giving way to images of the French Indochina war taken by a little-remembered U.S. government photographer named Everette Dixie Reese. As the conflict escalated and the hardware multiplied, the images grow more horrific, culminating in the nightmare fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh in l975. It is a stunning story, made all the more so because it is the work of men who died in telling it.
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obert Capa, one of this century's great war photojournalists,
once said that a good photo has to be in close. Capa and 134
other photographers on both sides of the conflicts in Vietnam
and other parts of Indochina died following that advice.
Requiem, (Jonathan Cape; 336 pages) is a testament to how close
they got in capturing the tragedy of Southeast Asia's long years
of war.