Eddie Adams (photographer)
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General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong prisoner Nguyen Van Lem: Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph |
Eddie Adams (
June 12,
1933 â€"
September 19,
2004) was an
American photographer noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and as a
photojournalist having covered 13 wars.
It was while covering the
Vietnam War for the
Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General
Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a
Vietcong prisoner,
Nguyen Van Lem, on a
Saigon street, on
February 1,
1968, during the opening stages of the
Tet Offensive.
Adams won the 1969
Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a
World Press Photo award for the photograph (captioned
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon), but would later lament its notoriety.
On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in
Time :
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?'
Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to Loan's honor while he was alive. When General Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a hero of a just cause.
He once said that "I would have rather been known more for the series of photographs I shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to
Thailand in a 30-foot boat, only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines." The photographs, and accompanying reports, helped persuade then President
Jimmy Carter to grant the nearly 200,000 Vietnamese
boat people asylum. Eddie Adams remarked" "It did some good and nobody got hurt."
Adams died in
New York City from complications of
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (
Lou Gehrig's disease).
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Voice autobiography of execution by Photographer Eddie Adams*
Eddie Adams Photographs*
Eddie Adams obituary
