No foreign photographer spent more time in Vietnam than Horst Faas, who oversaw photographers in Saigon for The Associated Press, who was based there from 1962 until late 1970 and then regularly returned until the withdrawal of American forces in 1973. Despite being heavily wounded just before the Tet offensive — which did not stop him from going to the office on crutches during the attacks on Saigon — he survived the war thanks to a cocktail of fearlessness, Germanic common sense, good luck and wry humo
Source: Opinion | In Vietnam, Turning a Camera on the War – The New York Times
David Lindsay Jr.
Hamden, CT | Pending Approval
Thank you James Hill for this extraordinary story. You wrote, “In 1993 Tim Page, a British photographer who was wounded four times during the war, approached Mr. Faas to help produce a visual memorial to the photographers who had died in Vietnam. Mr. Page had already managed to unearth a large number of works from photographers who had been documenting the North Vietnamese side. …their book, “Requiem,” appeared in 1997. . . “When the exhibition first opened in Hanoi in March 2000, Mr. Faas was amazed to see veterans from the war arrive with magnifying glasses to look at details in the photographs. His and Mr. Page’s only stipulations were that the images should be accompanied by short, objective captions; no polemics. The exhibit is now on permanent display in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City; standing there for over an hour this summer I watched as a mix of local schoolchildren and tourists came in to look, often overwhelmed by its earnestness and the power of the images on display.” If I ever return to Vietnam, I will find this museum in Ho Chi Minh City. I will find the book Requiem,which I had never heard of. In my library, I treasure a photo book, :Vietnam Inc,” 1971, by the photographer Phililp Jones Griffiths. Sad, haunting, and extraordinary. x David Lindsay Jr. is the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam,” and blogs on Vietnam at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNewsWorldwide.wordpress.com