Photographs Lie

"I killed the general with my camera."

An article by Duncan Currie at The Weekly Standard, Sep. 24 (emphasis in original):

Photojournalist Eddie Adams died last Sunday [Sep. 19] at age 71, but his place in history is secure. Indeed, Adams made history with his famous picture of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Taken in Saigon on February 1, 1968, the picture showed Gen. Loan's point-blank execution of a Viet Cong captain named Bay Lop [a.k.a. Nguyen Van Lem]. The images were searing: Loan's cold grimace; a snub-nosed .38 revolver held inches from Lop's terrified face; the fiercely clenched teeth of an officer standing nearby.

It won a Pulitzer Prize for the Associated Press in 1969, and was one of the most influential still photos of the 20th century. But until the day he died, Eddie Adams regretted having taken it....

I learned from this Communist Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article that Adams was a native of this area:

.... In later years, Mr. Adams found himself so defined and haunted by the picture that he would not display it at his studio. He also felt it unfairly maligned Loan, who lived in Virginia after the war and died in 1998.

"The guy was a hero," Mr. Adams said, recalling Loan's explanation that the man he executed was a Viet Cong captain, responsible for murdering the family of Loan's closest aide a few hours earlier.

"Sometimes a picture can be misleading because it does not tell the whole story," Mr. Adams said in an interview for a 1972 AP photo book. "I don't say what he did was right, but he was fighting a war and he was up against some pretty bad people."

Mr. Adams won a 1969 Pulitzer Prize for the Saigon execution picture, among the more than 500 honors he received....

Here is what Adams wrote in Time when Loan died:

JULY 27, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 4

Eulogy

I won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a photograph of one man shooting another. Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?" General Loan was what you would call a real warrior, admired by his troops. I'm not saying what he did was right, but you have to put yourself in his position.

The photograph also doesn't say that the general devoted much of his time trying to get hospitals built in Vietnam for war casualties. This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn't taken the picture, someone else would have, but I've felt bad for him and his family for a long time. I had kept in contact with him; the last time we spoke was about six months ago, when he was very ill.

I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, "I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes."

—Eddie Adams

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See also Calvin Explains How Media Bias Works.

(Thanks, Craig.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 09/28/04 05:39:30 PM
Categorized as Media.