Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams dead at 71
Vietnam War photo affixes his place in history

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I34549-2004Sep19 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/flash/photo/entertainment/2004-09-19_adams/index_frames.htm?startat=1&indexFile=entertainment_2004-09-19_adams)
Etched in history: South Vietnamese National Police Chief Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong officer, Saigon, 1968. (Adams, Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/flash/photo/entertainment/2004-09-19_adams/index_frames.htm?startat=1&indexFile=entertainment_2004-09-19_adams))

The man behind one of the most memorable photographs in history has died. Eddie Adams passed away at age 71, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gherig's disease.

For the photographer, the picture left a daunting legacy: He felt pressure to match the power of the image for the rest of his career, and he faced occasional scoldings from colleagues.

At an awards ceremony, a Dutch reporter asked, "Why didn't you stop him from shooting that man?"

Mr. Adams couldn't look at the picture for two years.

"I was getting money for showing one man killing another," he said soon after he won the Pulitzer. "Two lives were destroyed" -- the general later encountered immigration difficulties in the United States over the shooting -- "and I was getting paid for it. I was a hero" . . . .

. . . . Largely, he tried to find redemption for the photo that won him the Pulitzer. He came close, he said, when in 1977 he captured Thai authorities preventing the landing by boat of Vietnamese refugees.

He said the resulting pictures helped persuade President Jimmy Carter to admit hundreds of thousands of boat people to the United States.

"I'd rather have won the Pulitzer for something like that," Mr. Adams said. "It did some good, and nobody got hurt."

Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33900-2004Sep19.html)

There is, at the beginning of the television miniseries V, a scene in which a cameraman gets firsthand footage of a Central American guerilla war, and at the end of which his life is saved by the arrival of a miles-across Ufo. In the novelization of the miniseries and its sequel, by A.C. Crispin, there is a brief moment in which the narrative turns introspective and considers the ghoulishness of what the character does, feeding on the dead in the form of spectacular videotape.

In the twenty-first century, we've skipped right past the question, and generally indict the news images and the cameramen who take them as fodder for an audience dependent on the spectacular, the fabulous, the strikingly macabre. Nonetheless, the question still persists more firmly than we might give it credit. And this photograph of Eddie Adams' is one that crystallizes the concept.

The answers to the specific question seem to present themselves like a parade:

• It was just ... that moment.
• There was no time. What could I have done, yelled?
• Dude, it's a war. F@ck you want me to do about it?
• (slap!)

When it's a moose, or some lions, we're horrified if the unseen hands behind the lens extend to somehow affect the goings-on in front. Careers are ruined over fake nature footage. Oh, sure, you wound the thing (was that story debunked?) and then get the killshot when the predator ends its misery; maybe give the snowshoe rabbits some Prozac.

But camera or no camera, what would anyone have done in that moment?

I remember video of a funeral, somewhere in the former Yugoslavia. A grandmother, having outlived her children, outlives the last of her grandchildren. As they bury the child there is an eerie silence, and then the shells start landing. The old woman is hit by shrapnel and the news crew packs her into the car, leaving a couple members--including the camera--behind, huddled down in a cemetery amid the explosions.

The question itself is a quiet cultural icon because of Eddie Adams. This is not some Asian Kitty Genovese moment. It's a moment etched in history, haunting a man to the grave, and changing a nation's--daresay a world's--idea of what war is worth.

Click on the links. Really. The picture of Mother Teresa is astounding.
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• Bernstein, Adam. "Photojournalist Eddie Adams, Pulitzer Prize-Winner, Dies". Washington Post, September 20, 2004; page B06. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33900-2004Sep19.html
• Washington Post. "Camera Works: Eddie Adams's Daunting Legacy". See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/flash/photo/entertainment/2004-09-19_adams/index_frames.htm?startat=1&indexFile=entertainment_2004-09-19_adams

There is something of the psychology of the cameraman as well: looking through the view-finder distances you from the world and your subject. There's an extraordinary piece of film from when Pinochet usurped power in Chile. A cameraman turned around and focussed on a soldier who is aiming a rifle at him and continued shooting while he was shot and killed.

There's an extraordinary piece of film from when Pinochet usurped power in Chile. A cameraman turned around and focussed on a soldier who is aiming a rifle at him and continued shooting while he was shot and killed.

That must be amazing to see. A link I post around here from time to time for other purposes--an excerpt of Kapuscinski's Shah of Shahs (http://www.usna.edu/Users/history/tucker/hh362/Shah%20of%20Shahs.htm)--tells the tale of a cameraman's last shot:

Act Two is the most dramatic. The cameramen stand on the roofs of buildings, filming the unfolding scene from above, a bird's-eye view. First they show us what's happening in the street. Two tanks and two armored cars are parked there. Soldiers in helmets and bulletproof vests have already taken up firing positions on the sidewalks and road. They wait. Now the cameramen show the approaching demonstration. First it appears in the distant perspective of the street, but soon we'll see it close up. Yes, there's the head of the procession. Men are marching, and women and children, too. They're wearing white, symbolizing readiness to die. The cameramen show us their faces, still alive. Their eyes. The children, already tired but calm, want to see what's going to happen. The crowd, marching directly toward the tanks, never slowing down or stopping-a hypnotized crowd? spellbound? moonstruck?-marches as if it sees nothing, as if wandering across an uninhabited earth, a crowd that at this moment has already begun to enter heaven. Now the picture trembles because the hands of the cameraman are trembling. A thump, shooting, the whizz of bullets, screams coming from the television. Close-ups of soldiers changing clips. Close-up of a tank turret pivoting from left to right. Close-up of an officer, comic relief, his helmet has fallen over his eyes. Close-up of the pavement, and then the image flies violently up the wall of the house across the street, over the roof and the chimney into blank space with only the edge of a cloud visible, and then an empty frame and blackness. The inscription on the screen says this was the last footage shot by the cameraman, but others survived to retrieve and preserve the testimony. (Kapuscinski (http://www.usna.edu/Users/history/tucker/hh362/Shah%20of%20Shahs.htm))
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• Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. New York: Vintage, 1992. See http://www.usna.edu/Users/history/tucker/hh362/Shah%20of%20Shahs.htm