Showing posts with label Vietnam Execution photo Saigon execution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vietnam Execution photo Saigon execution. Show all posts

Thursday, September 5, 2013

"In a digital world, the pre-eminence of Vietnam-era photography is unlikely ever to be duplicated"


Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Saigon, 1968
Eddie Adams/©AP Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Saigon, 1968
 


Via The New York Times:


"Perhaps even more viscerally even than on television, America’s most wrenching war in our time hit home in photographs, including these three searing prize-winning images from The Associated Press newsmen Malcolm W. Browne, Eddie Adams and Nick Ut. They are the subject of retrospectives now, in a new book and accompanying exhibitions.
      
No single news source did more to document the bitter and costly struggle against North Vietnamese Communist regulars and Vietcong insurgents, and to turn the home front against the war, than The A.P."  Full article here.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011

12th International Istanbul Biennial


The art world's moveable feast takes up residence in Istanbul this week, as the opening of the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Sept. 17-Nov. 13, 2011, corresponds with the launch of a new art fair, Art Beat Istanbul, Sept. 14-18, 2011. Also on the schedule are the inauguration of several new galleries. More here from Artnet.

12th Istanbul Biennial, “Untitled,” 2011

Sept. 17-Nov. 13, 2011

Art and politics is the theme of the 12th Istanbul Biennial, which promises to present artworks that are both formally innovative and politically outspoken. It takes as its point of departure the work of the Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose work was able to “integrate high modernist, minimal and conceptual references with themes of everyday life.” The festival, which is organized by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, embraces Gonzalez-Torres’ idea that the world can be made a better place, and that art can be a catalyst for change.

To paraphrase Gonzalez-Torres, the 12th Istanbul Biennial is “Untitled” because meaning is always changing in time and space. The biennial consists of five group exhibitions and more than 50 solo presentations, all housed in a single venue, Antrepo 3 and 5 exhibition halls. Each of the group shows (“Untitled (Abstraction),” “Untitled (Ross),” “Untitled (Passport),” “Untitled (History)” andUntitled (Death by Gun)”) departs from a specific work by Gonzalez-Torres. Visitors are encouraged to become active readers, not just silent recipients.

Participating artists, whose names have still not been officially released, include Eddie Adams, with a rare series of three vintage photographs from Street Execution of a Viet Cong Officer, Saigon, 1968, on loan from Monroe Gallery of Photography. The photographs are featured in the "Untitled (Death by Gun)" exhibition.

Related: The New York Times: A Simplified and Secretive Istanbul Biennial

               The Guardian has compliled a list of 10 of the best modern art galleries in Istanbul and  a slide show: Vintage Istanbul - in pictures.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The Pulitzer Eddie Adams Didn’t Want

Lens - Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism


April 19, 2011, 5:00 am
By DONALD R. WINSLOW


Series of three prints


For a long time after Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for “Saigon Execution,” he wouldn’t speak of it. He turned away questions about the picture, grumbling some dismissive rebuff like, “Everything’s already been said about it.” Or: “There’s nothing new. I don’t want to talk about it now.” I experienced this firsthand in the 1970s as a college student. At an Indiana University seminar, I asked him about “Saigon Execution.” Before an auditorium packed with photojournalism students, Eddie cut me off at the knees, then pointed to the next raised hand.

I was stunned. After the slide show we’d just watched, we were collectively in awe. Eddie seemed like some kind of photojournalism God. I had no idea I’d stumbled onto such a sore point. It didn’t make sense. Who wouldn’t want to talk about one of history’s most iconic war pictures and winning the Pulitzer Prize? Why on earth would someone shun such an honor?

Eddie and I were later to become friends. But even in 2004, when he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at 71, I still didn’t have the full story.

Indeed, the reason for his seemingly inexplicable feelings remained a mystery until just recently. His widow, Alyssa Adams, donated his archive to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin on the fifth anniversary of Eddie’s death. The archive includes more than 50 years’ worth of material from a journalist who covered 13 wars, six American presidents and nearly every major film star. With his family’s permission, Alison M. Beck of the Briscoe Center allowed me an advance peek into the archive as the staff categorized 200 linear feet of slides, negatives, prints, audio and video materials, diaries, notes and tear sheets. Everything captured my interest, but Eddie’s journals were the gems.

It turns out that he did, in fact, very much want to win a Pulitzer Prize. Desperately. Almost obsessively. But what I didn’t know until I sat in the basement of the Briscoe Center reading his 1963 and 1964 journals — scrawled in little red leather notebooks — was that Eddie wanted to win a Pulitzer long before he’d ever encountered a Vietcong prisoner named Nguyen Van Lem or Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese national police.

There, in his own handwriting, Eddie acknowledged how deeply he wanted to win a Pulitzer for his photograph of the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, holding the folded flag that had been handed to her at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in November 1963. Eddie was angry when he didn’t win a Pulitzer and then furious when he found out that an administrator at The Associated Press had submitted other A.P. pictures to the Pulitzer jury instead. His photo hadn’t even been entered.


At John F. Kennedy's funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy held the flag that had covered her husband's coffin.



The photo that did win the Pulitzer Prize that year was by Bob Jackson of The Dallas Times-Herald. It showed Jack Ruby lunging out of a crowd to shoot and kill the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, during a perp walk. It was what’s known as a “reflex” picture; taken when there isn’t time to think, when some movement or sound screams to the brain, “Push the shutter now!”

So Eddie watched the Pulitzer for coverage of the Kennedy assassination go to a reflex picture rather than one so intentionally poignant, one that captured a national moment of mourning, a timeless and heartbreaking milestone in America’s history.



Associated Press
Eddie Adams in Vietnam. 1965.


But that doesn’t seem enough to keep him angry about the Pulitzers for so many years. After all, Eddie often felt slighted, overlooked; in the shadow of others who seemed to get the spotlight for lesser accomplishments. Especially in his early career, he suffered from what friends called “insufficient adoration.”

I scanned his journals, thought back on our conversations and recalled the many times I’d listened to him speak to student photojournalists and professionals in classrooms or in bars or on street corners waiting for news to happen. I cobbled together the bits and pieces of insight he’d share sparingly with one friend or another over time. That’s when it dawned on me. As I held both photos side by side, I realized what he’d been hinting at and saying indirectly.

Eddie thought he’d won the Pulitzer for the wrong picture.


There’s something you have to take into account about Eddie. Before he was a photographer, he was a Marine. And some Marine principles took root in his heart: honesty, fairness and the importance of holding and protecting a higher moral ground. Bear this in mind as you contemplate the two photographs.


Eddie made the picture of Mrs. Kennedy on purpose. It was intentional. Methodical. It spoke to the deep photographic talent of Edward T. Adams. A perceived moment was approaching, it came, and he captured it. Magnificently. This is a shining example of the best of the best of his photography.

Now consider “Saigon Execution.” Eddie himself said it was a reflex picture. That day in Saigon in 1968, Eddie saw the general reaching for his pistol as he walked up to the prisoner’s side. When the general raised his hand, Eddie raised his 35-millimeter camera to his face. In a pure reflex he released the shutter. He wasn’t certain of what he’d photographed until the film was developed and an A.P. editor, Horst Faas, picked out that negative.

And that, for Eddie, was that. In the following days there’s barely any mention in his journal of “Saigon Execution.” What’s clear is that in 1968, this ex-Marine saw the shooting as something that simply happened in war. It was just another day in Vietnam. No big deal. A prisoner had been shot. As time passed, Eddie came guiltily to believe that the general had gotten a bum rap for the execution and that he — as the photographer — had played a significant role in “ruining a man’s life.” To a rough-and-tumble, blue-collar Marine from New Kensington, Pa., this wouldn’t have fit the definition of higher moral ground.

Years later, while laying out the pages one day for News Photographer, the monthly magazine of the National Press Photographers Association, I received a surprise phone call from Eddie. He said he knew I’d have to write his obituary sooner or later and he told me what he didn’t want the first sentence to say. He also grumbled that he’d made a similar phone call to The New York Times but that he knew, when the time came, “they probably won’t be able to help themselves.” (The Times’s obituary.)


Boat of no smiles, Vietnamese Refugees, Gulf of Siam, Thanksgiving Day,1977
Boat of no smiles, Vietnamese Refugees, Gulf of Siam, Thanksgiving Day,1977



Tuesday, September 21, 2010

EDDIE ADAMS WORKSHOP TO BE HONORED AT 2010 LUCIE AWARDS GALA AT LINCON CENTER

©The Eddie Adams Workshop



New York, NY -- The 8th annual Lucie Awards will honor The Eddie Adams Workshop at its Lincoln Center gala on Wednesday, October 27, 2010. Hosted by the non-profit, charitable Lucie Foundation, the awards recognize photographers and organizations that have made significant contributions to the advancement of photography. This year, the Workshop will be presented with the Visionary Award.


Other honorees at this year's event in New York City include the photographers Tina Barney, Howard Bingham, James Drake, Graciela Iturbide, Lee Tanner and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Tickets are on sale at http://www.lincolncenter.org/.

In 1976, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams bought a defunct dairy farm in Jeffersonville, New York, with an idea of transforming the big rural property into a “foto farm.” What that meant wouldn't become clear for another two decades, when he and wife Alyssa Adams created Barnstorm: The Eddie Adams Workshop, an invitation-only, tuition-free boot camp for 100 young photographers taught by the top professionals in the field. Since 1988, the Workshop has been a transformative experience for those lucky enough to attend the annual four-day program, and some have gone on to win their own Pulitzers and return as faculty, treating the next generation of photojournalists to a unique forum for shooting, editing and learning.

Students are divided into 10 teams of 10, each guided by a professional photographer, editor and a researcher through their assignments in and around Jeffersonville, 20 minutes from the original Woodstock concert site, and two hours from Manhattan. Together, these teams of young photographers descend on the astonishingly diverse community, shooting amid the rich, fall colors on the surrounding birch and fir trees that will factor heavily into their pictures. By the end of the weekend, several students are awarded with one of many coveted scholarships, internships, editorial assignments and other career-boosting prizes.

Throughout the years, faculty and guest speakers have included some of the most esteemed names in photography: Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Cornell Capa, Mary Ellen Mark, James Nachtwey, Platon, Hal Buell, James Colton, Kathy Ryan, Bill Eppridge, Eugene Richards, Nick Ut, Ralph Gibson, Jay Meisel and many others. The idea behind Barnstorm was to allow a new generation to meet these seasoned professionals, to exchange ideas, techniques and philosophies in the course of a single weekend, and maybe save some crucial time in their budding careers. It continues to operate with the active support of Nikon and other sponsors, keeping the Workshop alive in a difficult economy and an ever-shifting new media terrain.

That impulse is rooted in a shared commitment to picture journalism that Eddie Adams showed throughout his long career. Before his death at age 71 in 2004, Adams covered 13 wars, working for the Associated Press, Time and Parade, and enjoyed private portrait sessions with the likes of President Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood and Pope John Paul II. He witnessed the arrival of the Beatles in America and joined Fidel Castro at the Cuban leader's private fishing hole. But Adams is best known for one of the most notorious photographs of the Vietnam War, documenting the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon in 1968 with a sudden bullet to the head. The picture was published around the world, won Adams a Pulitzer, and is said to have contributed to America's exit from the war.

That experience remained with him, and at the Workshop he established an annual tribute to six photojournalists killed in Vietnam, a solemn but ultimately joyous ceremony. It is one more vivid memory that students take away from the experience.

Now in its 23rd year, the Eddie Adams Workshop lives on under the direction of Alyssa Adams, currently deputy photo editor at TV Guide. Top professionals still come to share, mentoring students who are enrolled based entirely on the quality of their work, not on ability to pay. Little has changed at the farm since the very beginnings of Barnstorm, beyond the inevitable shift from slide film to digital over the last decade, and the absence of Eddie himself.




For more information about Barnstorm: The Eddie Addams Workshop, visit http://www.eddieadamsworkshop.com/

To view more of Eddie Adams work and available signed prints, click here.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Associated Press head of photography Hal Buell and former Vietnam Chief of Bureau Richard Pyle lead discussion to conclude "Eddie Adams: Vietnam" special exhibit at Bethel Arts Center

Eddie Adams in Vietnam

Some 250 people attended a July 11 panel discussion at the museum at The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts featuring former AP head of photography Hal Buell and former Vietnam Chief of Bureau Richard Pyle to conclude its "Eddie Adams: Vietnam" special exhibit.

The panel consisted of people who knew and worked with Adams (1933-2004), an AP photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his iconic "Saigon Execution" photo of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Viet Cong officer in 1968. Buell led the conversation in Bethel, N.Y., headlined "Capturing Vietnam: A Panel of Photojournalists Who Covered Vietnam." Other participants included former LIFE and Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Eppridge and Russell Burrows, son of LIFE photographer Larry Burrows, who was killed in a helicopter shootdown in Laos. Pyle says "the panelists discussed the important role that still photographers played in Vietnam and the camaraderie formed among the journalists." The museum is near the farm where the Eddie Adams workshop for aspiring photographers is held annually. The Eddie Adams: Vietnam exhibit ran from May through July 11.