prerogatives of the military.This Is War!, subtitled,
A Photo-Narrative in Three Parts, also remains a
masterpiece of visual sequencing, a sophisticated
statement of the differences between linguistic and
visual narrative, and of the complexities of photo-
graphic truth-telling.
The two decades of bitter conflict in Vietnam—
the war against the French (1946–1954) and then
the Americans (1959–1975)—prompted the ma-
turation of ‘‘concerned’’ war photography, and
the heightening of its internal contradictions.
Unique in the history of twentieth century wars,
the American government not only welcomed but
actively facilitated photography to a great extent. In
a climate of official openness and permissiveness,
freelance photographers from around the world
descended on the country to work virtually at will.
War photographs accordingly became commodities
as they had not been before. The result was the
proliferation of a range of war photographs, from
dispassionate documents of military operations to
predatory, voyeuristic images of misery, to incisive
photojournalism and introspective, critical pictures
that become touchstones for the cultural upheaval
that eventually accompanied the war.
At the same time, photographs for the first time
took their place in the mist of extensive television
coverage. On balance, photography accounted for
a comparatively small part of the public’s contem-
poraneous exposure to the Indochinese war, not-
withstanding the great volume of photographs
made. (Life’s photographic coverage of the war
was particularly paltry at the height of the war
between 1967 and 1971, censoring the war’s esca-
lating toll and its unpopularity in favor of the illu-
sion of a morally untroubled good life occasionally
beset by news from afar.) War photography in the
age of television also became synoptic, a distillation
of the river of television pictures that followed the
conflict as it progressed from the ineffectual Amer-
ican attempt to win Vietnamese ‘‘hearts and
minds,’’ to increasing American aggression, and
ultimately the obscenity of blind killing on the pre-
text, as the historian Jorge Lewinski observes, that
the communist evil was worse than napalm.
A heightened sense of the throes of combat was
the major topos of the war’s photography, with
many photographers astutely portraying the misery,
the pain, and the confusion of jungle and city war-
fare, notably the American photographers, Cathe-
rine Leroy, Robert J. Ellison, and Oliver Noonan;
the French photographers, Henri Huet, Christine
Spengler, and Gilles Caron; the Japanese photogra-
pher, Kyoichi Sawada; and the Singaporian photo-
grapher, Terrence Khoo. David Douglas Duncan
used Vietnam to elaborate his lyrical and hawkish
vision of the combat experience, while the British
photographers, Larry Burrows, Donald McCullin,
and Philip Jones Griffiths articulated different
degrees of liberal response. Reflecting a personal
shift from support of the war to disillusionment
before his 1971 death in combat, Burrows’ photo-
graphs are simultaneously unsentimental and pro-
foundly elegiac—many exploiting a distinctly
monochromatic use of color, dominated by grayish
greens and pale browns—showing a war made
equally of determination and grief. McCullin’s
black and white photographs, by contrast, relent-
lessly locate the meaning of the war in the human
body itself—pained, mangled, deranged with suffer-
ing—and so wrest the chief symbol of war from the
grip of flags, explosions, and guns. McCullin’s 1974
book,Is Anyone Taking Any Notice?collects photo-
graphs from Vietnam and other conflicts, rendering
distinct victims and distinct conflicts as matter of
undifferentiated agony (an approach later repeated
in James Nachtwey’s 1989Deeds of War,andparti-
cularly his 1999 globetrotting cenotaph, Inferno.)
Jones Griffiths, by contrast, offers a relentless cri-
tique of the war in his 1971 book,Vietnam Inc.,
which astutely moves the viewer between the military
and civilian realms of loss, educating the viewer
without indulging a Western-centric bias.
Prototypical cases of photographs taken for
metonyms of the entire war are the Pulitzer Prize
winning photographs by Vietnamese-born photo-
grapher, Nick Ut, who photographed a naked
Phan Thi Kim screaming in pain with other chil-
dren on a highway, after her home was struck by
napalm on June 8, 1972, and by the American
photographer, Eddie Adams, who photographed
Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of
the South Vietnamese National Police and head
of the South Vietnamese Central Intelligence Orga-
nization, executing Bay Hop, a captured Viet Cong
soldier, on February 1, 1968 in Saigon. In Adams’s
photograph, we see Loan firing a bullet point blank
into Hop’s head; Hop, wincing, appears to be
receiving the bullet, though has not yet collapsed
in death. The photograph presents us not with a
story but only a terse, unsparing, intensely violent
ending—if not as graphically violent an ending as
shown by the television footage of the same inci-
dent. For many viewers, the picture was also cli-
mactic, proclaiming the horror and immorality of
the war, signifying its barbarity and its incoher-
ence. That the image should have functioned—or
more properly, performed—in this way is typicallyWAR PHOTOGRAPHY