The Vietnam war remembered in pictures – review

[Judi Lynn]

The Vietnam war remembered in pictures – review

Tribute to Henri Huet and the photographers who risked all to capture images of Vietnam conflict opens at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris

Claire Guillot
Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 15 March 2011 14.01 GMT
Link to Henri Huet photo gallery

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US army helicopters providing support for ground troops fly into a staging area
80km north-east of Saigon. Photograph: Henri Huet/AP

A host of photographers with first-hand experience of the Vietnam war gathered at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (MEP) last month. We saw Nick Ut, famous for his 1972 picture of a young girl running naked towards the camera to escape a napalm attack. Christine Spengler, one of the few women to have covered the conflict, was also there. The atmosphere was emotional, almost reverent. Forty years earlier, on 10 February 1971, their friend Henri Huet, a Frenchman working for Associated Press, was shot down in a helicopter over the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. The exhibition at the MEP pays tribute to this gifted photographer.

The pictures soon started people talking. The photographers all said much the same thing: no war made such an impression on their life and career as Vietnam. For one thing, this conflict was by far the most deadly for their trade. A book, Requiem (edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page), counted 135 photographers killed on both sides. In a powerful picture taken in 1965, Huet captured the last moments of fellow reporter Dickey Chapelle. She lies on the ground mortally wounded. An army chaplain crouches over her saying the last rites.

Three other photographers died in the same helicopter as Huet: Keisaburo Shimamoto, a Japanese reporter working for Newsweek, the American Kent Potter, from United Press International, and a British journalist, Larry Burrows, whose colour pictures in Life magazine gained international acclaim. Ut narrowly missed taking the same ill-fated helicopter: "Henri was my best friend and we were both working for AP," he says, barely containing his emotion. "I was supposed to take that flight, but we did a swap ... He took my place, and he's the one who died."

Ut was only 15 when his elder brother, another AP operative, was killed. The family were short of money, so Ut was dispatched to fill the gap. After working in the labs for three months, he went into action.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/15/vietnam-photography-huet-guillot-review

[WheelWalker]

1. Thank you for the reminder.

Blessings.

[struggle4progress]

2. (GRAPHIC WARNING) Sanitized news coverage post-Vietnam allows everyone to forget

that war is all about the bleeding broken burned bodies of civilians and soldiers alike, men or women or children

It's so much easier to regard a war as an honorable endeavor if we do not see what it really is

I remember a time when people looked at such images and thought about them



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