Hugh Van Es, Photojournalist Who Covered Vietnam, Dies at 67

Hugh Van Es, Photojournalist Who Covered Vietnam, Dies at 67

c. The New York Times

By KEITH BRADSHER

Published: May 15, 2009

HONG KONG — Hubert Van Es, a Dutch photojournalist who covered the Vietnam War and took one of the best-known images of the American evacuation of Saigon in 1975 — people scaling a ladder to a helicopter on a rooftop — died here on Friday. He was 67.

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong announced his death on behalf of his wife, Annie. Mr. Van Es fell into a coma a week ago when he suffered a brain aneurysm. He died on Friday at Queen Mary Hospital.

Mr. Van Es was in the offices of United Press International on April 29, 1975, when he saw about 30 Americans on the rooftop of an apartment building several blocks away climbing a long ladder to board a Central Intelligence Agency helicopter.

Mr. Van Es, known as Hugh, took the photo using a long lens and sent it out over the U.P.I. wire service. The building in the picture housed C.I.A. officials and families, but in reprintings it has often been described incorrectly as the American Embassy in Saigon. Thousands of people were evacuated by helicopter during the fall of South Vietnam.

The photo became one of the war’s defining images. Mr. Van Es took other memorable pictures of the conflict, like one of a wounded soldier, a cross gleaming against his silhouette, from the battle of Hamburger Hill in May 1969. He gained a reputation for fearlessness. But for the rest of his life he was known primarily for that image from Saigon.

“He was obviously a very good photographer, but what he did was to capture the end,” said Ernst Herb, the president of the correspondents’ club.

Born in Hilversum, the Netherlands, Mr. Van Es decided to become a photographer after seeing an exhibition of the work of the renowned war photographer Robert Capa. He arrived in Hong Kong as a freelancer in 1967, joined The South China Morning Post as chief photographer and initially went to Vietnam the following year, after getting a job as a sound man for NBC News, according to The Associated Press. After a stint with NBC, he joined the A.P. photo staff in Saigon from 1969 to 1972 and then covered the last three years of the war, from 1972 to 1975, for U.P.I.

When he took the Saigon picture, Mr. Van Es was in the process of leaving U.P.I. to become a freelancer again. Based in Hong Kong after the war, he also covered the Moro rebellion in the Philippines and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Mr. Van Es was dismayed that he did not receive royalties from the use of the Saigon photo, which belonged to U.P.I. The rights have since been sold twice, along with many other photos taken by the wire service’s photographers. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, now owns the rights to the photo through Corbis, a company he created.

Besides his wife of 39 years, Mr. Van Es is survived by an older sister in the Netherlands, said Kees Metselaar, another photojournalist based in Hong Kong.

Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to represent photographs by colleagues of Hugh Van Es, including Eddie Adams and Nick Ut

STEPHEN WILKES FEATURED IN FAIRFIELD MUSEUM EXHIBIT

Canoe on Sachem Pond, Block Island
Stephen Wilkes

Stephen Wilkes' photographs are featured in the exhibition "IMAGES – The First Annual
Fairfield Museum Photography Exhibition".

The exhibit runs from April 25 - June 7, 2009

Featuring photography by Stephen Wilkes
and a Juried Exhibit of work by professional and
serious amateur photographers.

Jurors included Stephen Wilkes, Eric Meola,
Joanna McCarthy and Larry Silver.

The Fairfield Museum and Historical Society

370 Beach Road, Fairfield CT 06824Phone: 203-259-1598Fax: 203-255-2716
Museum Hours Monday-Friday 10:00 - 4:00 p.m. Thursday 10:00 - 6:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday 12 noon-4:00 pm

REDISCOVERED ROBERT CAPA PHOTOGRAPHS NOW ONLINE

The International Center of Photography has digitized thousands of previously unseen Spanish Civil War photos by legendary photojournalists Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, and Gerda Taro.

The preservation effort was one of the final projects of Cornell Capa, Robert’s brother and the founder of ICP, who died in 2008. Also instrumental in getting the negatives into the hands of ICP was Richard Whelan, a Capa biographer who died in 2007.

The three cardboard boxes of negatives—nicknamed the “Mexican Suitcase”—contained some 4,300 frames. Researchers attributed about a third of the pictures to each photographer. Additionally, there were two rolls of portraits of Capa and Taro attributed to photographer Fred Stein.

Through a chain of sometimes murky transactions, the Mexican Suitcase photos made their way from Capa’s Paris studio (where Capa left them when he fled the city in 1939) into the hands of Mexican filmmaker Benjamin Tarver in the 1990s. ICP managed to obtain the negatives in December 2007. ICP says no money changed hands.

The collection is not an exhaustive archive of the trio’s Spanish Civil War coverage, and does not contain any negatives of Capa’s “Falling Soldier,” among his most famous images, and the subject of a long-running debate over whether it was staged.

However, the work is providing historians with insights into how the photographers worked and where they traveled.Capa and Chim were founding members of Magnum Photos. The Spanish Civil War was a defining moment in photojournalism, and these three photographers earned their reputations by venturing close to the front lines. All three of the photographers were eventually killed in action. Taro, Robert Capa’s partner, died in 1937 after being struck by a tank in Spain. Robert Capa was killed by a landmine in Southeast Asia in 1954. Chim was killed by Egyptian machine gunners in 1956 covering the Suez crisis.

©PDN

MICHELLE MONROE RADIO INTERVIEW ABOUT MARK SHAW EXHIBIT TO AIR WEDNESDAY

An interview with Michelle Monroe of Monroe Gallery of Photography will air on KPFK radio (Los Angeles) Wednesday, May 6 at 12 noon Pacific time. The interview will be simultaneously available by webcast.

Treasures of the West host Pam Wilson interviewed Michelle Monroe in the gallery about Monroe Gallery's dedication to exhibiting photojournalist's work and the current Mark Shaw Retrospective. Mark Shaw, who lived from 1922-1969, is perhaps best known for his images of Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy and their family which he originally photographed on assignment for LIFE magazine, and later as their family photographer.

Additionally, Shaw worked for LIFE magazine beginning in 1952 and in 16 years shot 27 covers and almost 100 stories. His photographs of Audrey Hepburn, originally shot for LIFE in 1953, had been lost after Mark Shaw’s death, and were only found in 2005. (This May 4th would have been Audrey Hepburn's 80th birthday).

Also leading fashion photographer, Mark Shaw worked for Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and a host of other fashion magazines. Throughout the 1950's and 1960s' Mark Shaw shot the European fashion collections for LIFE, and was one of the first photographers to shoot fashion on the runways and "backstage" at the couture shows.

KPFK, based in Los Angeles, was the second of what would eventually become five Pacifica Broadcasting Stations to go on the air. Started in 1959 with an enormous transmitter in a prime location, KPFK is the most powerful public radio station in the Western United States.

STANLEY J. FORMAN SLIDESHOW

WCVB TV, The Boston Channel, has just posted a great slide-show of photographs by Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist Stanley J. Forman.

Stanley J. Forman is an accomplished photographer with more than five decades dedicated to his craft. Forman's career is marked by work for media throughout the Greater Boston area, filing for the print dailies, weeklies and wire services. His 1976 Pulitzer Award for The Boston Fire was the first of three; Forman also won the award in 1977 for Spot News Photography, for documenting a youth using the flag as a lance during street disorders, and in 1978, Forman was part of the Boston Herald American staff which won the Pulitzer for Feature Photography of that year's blizzard.

On winning the first of his Pulitzer Prizes, Forman was pragmatic in knowing that his work resulted in tougher fire codes. "I daydream about making pictures that have the impact that those pictures had," he says.

Forman has worked as a cameraman at Boston TV station WCVB since 1983. Monroe Gallery is honored to represent his photography.

AUDREY HEPBURN WOULD HAVE TURNED 80 MAY 4

Iconic actress Audrey Hepburn, who charmed a generation of moviegoers with her unique style and grace, would have turned 80 this May 4. There are several events and film screenings scheduled world-wide to celebrate Audrey Hepburn's life.

Her family, friends, the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund, and UNICEF will commemorate this occasion with the presentation of The Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award given in recognition to those who work to aid children throughout the world. This year's recipient is Irena Sendler, a former Polish Resistance Fighter who was responsible for saving 2,500 Jewish children during the WWII German occupation of Poland.

On May 3, the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund will host a screening of "Taare Zameen Par" (Every Child is Special) in Berlin. Sean Hepburn Ferrer personally contacted the star Aamir Khan to invite him for a special screening of the film.

Monroe Gallery of Photography is featuring a major retrospective exhibition of photographs by Mark Shaw through June 29, including many images of Audrey Hepburn. Photographed on assignment for LIFE magazine in 1953 during the filming of Sabrina, the negatives were only found by the photographer's son David Shaw in 2006. Included in the exhibit are several rare vintage prints.

A new book of photographs of Audrey by Mark Shaw has just been published, "Charmed by Audrey", available in bookstores everywhere. There are numerous screenings of Audrey Hepburn's movies scheduled across the United States and abroad, check your local city listings.

ERIC SMITH PHOTOGRAPHS FEATURED IN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBIT

Michigan Central Train Depot, Arrival and Departure Area, 2008

The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago is proud to present The Edge of Intent, an exhibition looking at the utopian aspirations of urban planners, and how their idealistic visions sometimes become static and incapable of adapting to changing environments and systems. The works in this exhibition warn us of the hazards of “thinking big,” while urging us to consider the centrality of dynamism in successful urban design.

The exhibit opening on May 1, 2009 includes a 5:00 pm tour of the works on view by curator Natasha Egan and artists Christina Seely, Tim Long and Andrew Harrison.

This exhibition coincides with the centennial celebration of Daniel Burnhamʼs 1909 plan for the city of Chicago. The exhibition will reflect the centennial celebrationʼs statement of “advancing bold new plans” by encouraging and inspiring viewers to look at the ways urban planning has been instituted in a variety of settings and to learn from the past successes or failures in implementing these plans. By looking through the unique lens these artists provide in their work, the exhibition will challenge the audience to see beyond existing notions of a cityʼs layout and to consider the effects a working plan can have upon an areaʼs inhabitants, and vice-versa. The exhibition includes photographs by Eric Smith, and continue through July 5.

Eric Smith’s (American, b. 1947) photographs record the Michigan Central Train Station in Detroit, once a vibrant hub of transportation, but now an abandoned, neglected, and graffiti-strewn monument to Detroit’s past. Built in 1913 in the Beaux Arts Style and closed in 1988, the building’s marble walls and Doric columns are solidly intact and the space retains its majestic scale. Smith uses digital techniques to depict the station with a sensuous, intensified luminosity, until the photographs resemble meticulously painted illustrations. On a cursory view these photographs can easily be taken for inventive depictions of a mythical setting, similar to Piranesi’s subterranean prisons. The station conjures Liset Castillo’s deteriorating sand castles, perhaps projecting the fall of both the Roman and the American empires.

"Cities can be tenuous places. As Marco Polo describes the city of Thekla to Kublai Khan:
Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.” And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, “Not only the city.”
— Natasha Egan, Associate Director and Curator