Posts Tagged ‘Larry Burrows’
I’ve Had a Lot of Luck in My Life (1)
Horst Faas. Photo by Jockel Finck
Horst Faas photographed a father cradling a child badly burned by napalm. And another of a father holding up a tiny corpse, either in supplication or in protest, while South Vietnamese soldiers impassively returned his gaze. He photographed a South Vietnamese officer, his expression savage, pushing the point of a knife into a prisoner’s abdomen. When the Vietcong caught a South Vietnamese battalion in an ambush at Binh Gia in December 1964, Faas was the only photographer to record the aftermath: one image shows a single South Vietnamese Ranger sitting amid the corpses of his comrades. It’s almost indescribably sad.
These were among the pictures he took that the Associated Press assessed as acceptable for distribution. Others were too grim to send out over the wire. And then there were the pictures that he didn’t take because they would have been too intrusive. Newsmen weren’t censored in Vietnam, he said, so sometimes they had to censor themselves.
Remarkably, for a man who knew far more than most of us do about man’s capacity for inhumanity, Faas seemed to me to be warm-hearted, generous and humane. When, two months ago, I sent him an email message by way of his French publisher, he responded instantly. “Of course I will help you with your project,” he wrote me. “Let me know if and when you would like to contact me.” What I didn’t know then was that he was desperately incapacitated: paralyzed almost from the neck down, able to move one hand just enough to peck at a keyboard. We skyped. Read the rest of this entry »
Picturing the Apocalypse
One day in 1992, Tim Page got in touch with Horst Faas. He had a bunch of photographs he wanted to show him.
Requiem, published in 1996, featured a photography by Larry Burrows on the front jacket.
Both men were veteran war photographers although, in other respects, they were radically different. Page, younger than Faas by a decade, had revelled in both the spiritual and pharmaceutical excesses of the 1960s. He had stumbled into picture-taking at the end of a crazily eventful road trip that ended in Laos when his funds ran out. He discovered more or less by accident that he had a knack for composing pictures when he picked up a camera. That knack led him to neighbouring Vietnam where he was fearless to the point of recklessness when following the troops. He was famously the model for the Dennis Hopper character in the film, Apocalypse Now. Exuberant and a little mad.
Faas belonged to a different generation. He was a child in Germany during the Second World War, had experienced bombing from the point of view of those on the ground looking up, and had acquired fortitude and survival skills of a high order. He served an apprenticeship in photography in Germany, tried a stint on London’s Fleet Street, and then was sent as a staff photographer with the Associated Press first to Algeria and then to the Congo. The African assignment was a bloody one. Faas thrived in it, however, snapping, among other notable pictures, the last known image of nationalist hero Patrice Lumumba before he was killed. Faas was subsequently dispatched to Laos and, from there, to Saigon, where he set up shop as the AP’s photo editor. He remained a fixture there for most of the war.
It was almost twenty years later that Page approached Faas with his sheaf of photographs. He was just back from a trip to Hanoi where he had purchased them for about a dollar apiece. The North Vietnamese, he said, were talking about their photographers and about the many who had lost their lives. Faas looked at the pictures, thought about it, and said, “Page, let’s do a book on the dead from the other side and from our side. But all of them, Vietnamese included.” And this was the origin of Requiem,* one of the most beautiful and moving collections of war photographs ever compiled. Read the rest of this entry »
