Eddie Adams

Eddie Adams took the photograph of a South Vietnamese police chief executing a prisoner in a Saigon street, won the Pulitzer for it, and spent the rest of his life uneasy about what it had done. He was a Marine combat photographer in Korea and covered thirteen wars for the Associated Press. On 1 February 1968, during the Tet Offensive, he followed a group of officers and photographed Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a bound Viet Cong captain, Nguyen Van Lem, in the head at the moment of the shot. The image ran everywhere within a day and became one of the pictures that turned American opinion against the war. Adams's later view was that it had told less than half a story: the prisoner had, by the accounts Adams accepted, been part of a squad that killed a South Vietnamese officer's whole family that morning, and Loan was ruined by the photograph, refused entry to public life, running a pizza restaurant in Virginia. Adams wrote that photographs are half-truths and that he had destroyed a man with a camera. He also photographed Vietnamese boat people in 1977 in a series that helped persuade Congress to admit some 200,000 refugees, and said that was the work he was proud of. He photographed twelve American presidents and a great many film actors, and he founded a workshop for young photographers on his farm that still runs. Loan died in 1998 and Adams sent flowers and a note of apology. The photograph is still used without the context, which is exactly what he objected to: he did not dispute that it was true, only that it was complete.

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