* Edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page.
Requiem* is a tribute to “the 135 photographers of different nations” who died while covering the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Designed as a memorial—the endpapers, inscribed with the names of the dead, deliberately echo the Vietnam “wall” in Washington, D.C.—it is not just a book of more or less startling photographs held together by an editorial concept. Requiem is a great photography book: a book, that is, with its own visual grammar and narrative coherence.
The first photos, taken by Everette Dixie Reese in the 1950s, are elegant, classical images of a serene and exotic landscape. Photographs from the war will show combat-haunted GIs with “the thousand-yard stare”; Reese photographs an old Vietnamese man with a thousand-year gaze. Another irenic image shows a Buddhist monk—the Western ideal of wisdom—but there are hints, too, that this is a part of the world where rivers have run routinely red. A twelfth-century stone relief shows a battle between the Khmer and Cham armies in 1177. In a picture by Pierre Jahan, a French sentry’s helmet gives him the look of an invading conquistador, which, in a sense, he is. An aerial shot of the Red River Delta shows a landscape that seems nothing else so much as camouflage patterned. Military aircraft begin to appear in Reese’s cloud-strewn skies, followed, in 1954, by French paratroopers. Then, in photographs by Jean Peraud, we get the first of the images of combat that will make up the bulk of the book. A few pages later the death of Robert Capa in the Red River Delta is announced.
Capa’s dying in Vietnam provides an essential continuity from images of the Second World War to those in this book. Many of Capa’s famous photos, from the Normandy invasion to the liberation of Paris, show soldiers tramping out of the edge of the frame, trudging from one battle to the next. The last photos he took, minutes before treading on a mine on May 25, 1954, show a column of soldiers wading through waist-high grass. They could be the same soldiers he had photographed in 1944. One of them even raises a rifle in familiar salute. Then Capa is blown to pieces. The column of soldiers marches on, invisibly, into the deepening conflict of Southeast Asia.
In keeping with this implied continuity, the war in Vietnam looks, at first, pretty much like the Second World War. In the early stages of that conflict, writers tended to see it through a poetic optic derived from the 1914–18 war, specifically through Wilfred Owen. In the same way, photographers tended to view the war in Vietnam through a filter or lens developed to cover the Second World War. The emphasis is on the ordinary, individual soldier, usually in moments of great danger. This is not surprising. After all, details of vegetation, topography, and complexion aside, the experience of men at the sharp end of combat remains fairly constant. The uniforms are different, but in every other respect, Dana Stone’s picture of South Vietnamese troops on a devastated hilltop outpost in Ha Than in 1968 could have been taken at Passchendaele fifty years earlier (in common with many accounts of the Third Battle of Ypres, a section of Requiem is titled “The Quagmire”). Robert J. Ellison’s shot of an ammunition dump exploding in front of three Marines is like a full-color version of W. Eugene Smith’s classic image of four Marines cowering from an explosion on Iwo Jima. (The pictures in Requiem do not only look back in time. Kyoichi Sawada’s photo of a dead Vietcong soldier being dragged behind an armored vehicle anticipates Paul Watson’s even grislier image of a U.S. soldier being hauled through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993.)
As the war progresses, so it begins to develop its own visual style. Capa had said that he preferred a powerful picture to one that was technically perfect. In Vietnam—most evidently in Catherine Leroy’s images published by Look in “full-bleed” (as the technical term so accurately puts it)—this distinction becomes increasingly blurred. Larry Burrows took carefully composed images, but for many photographers immediacy undiminished and unmediated by anaesthetic formal concerns was everything. This was not simply because of the exigencies of battle; or, rather, developments in non-combat photography lent themselves particularly well to the hazards of Vietnam. By the mid-1960s Robert Frank’s apparent indifference to traditional photographic virtues had become an ordering aesthetic in its own right. In Bystander: A History of Street Photography, Colin Westerbeck remarks that Garry Winogrand was trying “to see what is left of photography, what the essence of it is, after you give up the formal French rationality that Cartier-Bresson always hangs on to.” Where better to explore that question than a war where any vestige of rationality could be annihilated in four hours at My Lai? The Second World War had a shape, a purpose, that became evident both in the larger narrative (from Capa’s pictures of D-Day to George Rodger’s images of the liberation of Belsen) and within each of the individual, incremental pictures that make up that narrative. As the war in Vietnam progressed so it came to be seen—quite literally—as confused, chaotic, purposeless. Three years before he went missing in action in Cambodia, Dana Stone wrote to his parents that “the risks were getting way out of proportion to the gains. I seemed to be getting the same pictures that I had made many times before and as I became more accustomed to the war what had initially been interesting and exciting became dull and frightening.”
That was in 1967, by which time, according to Susan Moeller in her book Shooting War, three subject areas of combat imagery had begun to define the war visually. The main one of these was “men slogging through paddies.” She might have added “in torrential rain.” America’s increasingly absurd involvement in Southeast Asia is nicely suggested by Henri Huet’s picture of GIs wading through a paddy, keeping their weapons dry by holding them above the waist-deep water—even though the sky itself is flooding. (One soldier, incidentally, is holding his rifle one-handed in a way that inevitably recalls the soldier who greeted Capa eleven years previously, further reinforcing the impression that we are seeing the same column of men, tramping from battle to battle, from war to war to war, eternally.) In another of Huet’s pictures a soldier is completely submerged: all that can be seen above the surface of the water are hands and weapon.
The other two subject areas mentioned by Moeller are men calling in artillery and men leaping from choppers. These choppers have become the virtual logo of the Vietnam War. So much so that, through a process of infiltration by media association, songs by Hendrix and the Stones swirl inaudibly around the rotor blades of the choppers in this book. To put it another way, these photos of choppers constitute a kind of visible sound track. They are immediately identifiable as images from the Vietnam War because they look so like stills from a film. The real is authenticated by the pervasiveness of the fictive—which, in turn, was derived from photos by Tim Page, Burrows, and others.
A version of this narrowing gap between the real and the representational, between participants and observers, lies at the heart of the Requiem project. The photographers featured in this book talk habitually of using the camera as if it were a gun. On the brink of surrender, while the soldiers destroy their guns and ammunition, photographer Pierre Schoendoerffer destroys his camera and films. Several photographers carry arms as well as cameras; others, like Sam Castan, die as soldiers, gun—rather than camera—in hand.
Operating guerrilla-style on subsistence resources, fighting for the war of national liberation they were documenting, their Vietnamese counterparts were, in William Tuohy’s words, “soldiers first and cameramen second.” Only a few thousand of their negatives and prints survived the devastation of the war and its aftermath. Often next to nothing is known about the photographers themselves; in the biographies at the end of the book are many versions of the following entry: “No photographs of, or personal information about, Duong Cong Thien survived the war.”
The Americans, on the other hand, operated in a style similar to that of the government whose policies they came increasingly to oppose. As the military relied on technological might, so the American photographers were possessed of a limitless supply of photographic ordnance. According to Moeller, “Burrows carried so much [film] that he had rolls stuffed into his socks.” Saturation bombing by the military was matched by saturation photographing by the news media. If it sometimes seems—and I am trying to articulate an impression, not to offer an analysis of military strategy—that the First World War was fought in order that it might be remembered, then the Vietnam War sometimes seems to have been fought by the Americans in order to generate images of combat. In this context the section of the book titled “Escalation” refers, implicitly, not only to the war’s increasing scale but also to its escalating visibility.
While the North Vietnamese died invisibly, “their photographic deeds unrecorded” (Tuohy again), some of the photographers who covered the conflict from the other side gained considerable renown in their attempts to find images rivaling those of the master, Capa himself. Capa’s work is, if you like, the negative from which all the subsequent prints in this book are derived. Following his famous advice that equated proximity—to danger—with quality, many photographers in Vietnam aimed, as one writer put it, “to edge right up to death.” For these photographers, the thousand-yard stare got apertured down to three or four feet. Soldiers observing Burrows’s obsessive urge to get close to the action joked that he must be the most shortsighted photographer ever.
Now, this does not mean that the photographs taken by the men and women in this book are better—because they died—than those by photographers like Tim Page and Don McCullin who survived. But the fact of their having died lends their work—especially their last rolls of film, the shots they were taking hours or minutes before they were killed—a dramatic pathos. These pictures are like a technologically advanced version of the folk idea whereby the last thing we see before dying is imprinted on our retinas. Sam Castan’s last roll of exposed film was taken from him by a North Vietnamese soldier and recovered only when this soldier, in turn, was killed. On occasions like this—especially in Hiromichi Mine’s fire-and-water-damaged picture of a chaplain celebrating mass—it is as if the eyes of the dead are flickering open again, blinking through the mud in which they are lying. More importantly, the fact that Requiem is devoted entirely to the work of people who died profoundly influences the book’s narrative grasp.
When it was published in Life, Burrows’s picture (not included in this book) showing four Marines carrying the body of a fifth had to be cropped in order to eliminate from view another photographer who had strayed into the frame. In this book, though, the proximity of fellow photographers is immanent in its meaning. A photograph by Dickey Chapelle shows a South Vietnamese soldier preparing to execute a Vietcong prisoner while, to his left—exactly as prescribed by Auden in “Musée des Beaux Arts”—one of his comrades stands idly by, hands in pockets, smiling. Then, two pages later, we see a chaplain kneeling over Chapelle’s body, her head soaked in gore. In the first picture we saw what she saw; in the second—by Henri Huet—it is as if we share the point of view of the soul leaving the body. The photographer has assumed the place of her subject. Roland Barthes summed up the peculiar tense of photographs as “he is dead and he is going to die.” Requiem turns this around and applies it to the photographers: they are dead and they are going to die. Another dramatic picture by Huet shows Larry Burrows, cameras around his neck, helping GIs to battle through the downdraft of the evacuation helicopter to which they are carrying a wounded comrade. That was taken in 1970; in February the following year Burrows and Huet died together when the helicopter they were traveling in was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By the inexorable, terrifying logic of the book’s conception and arrangement, in other words, we take our place in the old war song quoted by François Sully—another photographer who died—in an article in Newsweek: “To each his turn. Today yours, tomorrow mine.”
1998
* Edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page.