{Historic/Removed}
Located at the Newseum..a museum of journalism has the following quote displayed in raised letters on one of its walls:
"If it makes you laugh,
if it makes you cry,
if it rips out your heart,
that's a good picture.'
Eddie Adams, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist"
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"Eddie Adams (June 12, 1933 – September 18, 2004) was an American photographer and photojournalist noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and for coverage of 13 wars. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969.
Combat photographer[edit]
Adams served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War as a combat photographer. One of his assignments was to photograph the entire Demilitarized Zone from end to end immediately following the war. This took him over a month to complete.[citation needed]
Pulitzer Prize winning photograph
...
It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General Nguy?n Ng?c Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner, Nguy?n Van Lém, 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. Writer and critic David D. Perlmutter points out that 'no film footage did as much damage as AP photographer Eddie Adams's 35mm shot taken on a Saigon street ... When people talk or write about [the Tet Offensive] at least a sentence is devoted (often with an illustration) to the Eddie Adams picture'.
Anticipating the impact of Adams's photograph, an attempt at balance was sought by editors in the New York Times. In his memoirs,
John G. Morris recalls that assistant managing editor Theodore M. Bernstein "determined that the brutality manifested by America's ally be put into perspective, agreed to run the Adams picture large, but offset with a picture of a child slain by Vietcong, which conveniently came through from AP at about the same time". Nonetheless, it is Adams's photograph that is remembered while the other far less dramatic image was overlooked and soon forgotten.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag is disturbed by what she sees as the staged nature of the photograph. She writes that 'he would not have carried out the summary execution there had [the press] not been available to witness it'. However, Donald Winslow of the New York Times quotes Adams as having described the image as a 'reflex picture' and 'wasn't certain of what he'd photographed until the film was developed'. Furthermore, Winslow notes that Adams 'wanted me to understand that “Saigon Execution” was not his most important picture and that he did not want his obituary to begin, “Eddie Adams, the photographer best known for his iconic Vietnam photograph ‘Saigon Execution’'."