Pete Hamill Remembers Eddie Adams

Thankfully, while trying to catch up and go through the ever-growing pile of newsprint on the floor, I came across New York Newsman Pete Hamill writing about his old friend photographer Eddie Adams. I would have been sad if I had missed it. Hamill also offers a few thoughts on war photography in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

Eddie Adams was not an amateur. He made one of those defining photographs of Vietnam in 1968, for which he won a 1969 Pulitzer Prize. It showed the South Vietnamese police commander shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head on the second day of the Tet offensive. The photograph made front pages all over the world, but you could never find a print of it on the walls of Eddie's various studios. There is no simple way to explain why such defining images have eluded today's professional war photographers. One explanation is simple: sheer luck. You must be there at the moment. If you're around the corner or stalled in traffic, or stopped by soldiers, the moment vanishes forever.

A more important reason might be the ferocious nature of Iraq itself - a ferocity that, I think, has something to do with the war's religious context. Visions of God were not a factor in Vietnam. Marx and Lenin, maybe. Nationalism, of course. But not God. Eddie Adams and all the others lived each day with the possibility of sudden death. Some were captured, held as prisoners, and later released.

But they did not fear being kidnapped, held hostage, and then beheaded as "infidels." In the savage urban warfare of Iraq, the desire to stay alive creates understandable restraint. You cannot shout the Iraqi equivalent of "Bao chi!" at the insurgents and hope for the best. Some of them believe they are fighting in a holy contest between Islam and Christianity.

There are also several other factors: censorship and self-censorship. After Vietnam, the press in general, and photographers in particular, were never as free again to cover American wars. A rigid system of image control was imposed in Grenada, Panama and the Gulf war. Though the Pentagon's experiment with embedding loosened some of those controls, there were still limits. No soldiers bleeding in the sand, please. No body bags. No coffins.

Posted by Jim at October 5, 2004 03:46 PM