#saigon execution

[thethirdbear]

[g-gaia-a]

[historydailyfrancischappellblack]

South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, in charge of the national police, executes assumed Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street early in the Tet Offensive. February 1, 1968. Image: Eddie Adams’ photograph “Saigon Execution” showing the moment Nguyễn Văn Lém is shot by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan On this day in history, February 1, 1968, South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, in…

View On WordPress

[olegdriukov-blog]

Как рассказать историю с помощью фотографии

или

пара слов о принципах.

 Что фотография делает со зрителем?

1.       Вызывает эмоции – страх, гнев, желание, радость, смех.

2.       Будит воображение – побуждает домыслить ситуацию, или – наделить незнакомое лицо чертами характера и привычками,  или – задуматься о прошлом/настоящем/будущем.

3.       Даёт информацию.

Восприятие фотографии может иметь любую последовательность.

Сначала информация, потом реакция, потом рассуждения. Если же это абстрактная композиция с глубокими цветами или тоновыми переходами, то, обычно сначала возникают эмоции, потом мы пытаемся понять

и так далее.

 Вот всемирно известный снимок периода Вьетнамской войны.

Мы становимся свидетелями ситуации – один человек наставляет на другого пистолет. Мы понимаем, что должен последовать выстрел. То есть, подключаем воображение. И лишь затем в нас начинают просыпаться эмоции. Ужас, от того, что «прямо сейчас», «на наших глазах» оборвётся чья-то жизнь. Гнев, сожаление, неприязнь.

 Главное, что мы должны понимать – фотография манипулирует сознанием человека.

Точно так же, как:

музыка,

изобразительное искусство,

литература,

историческая наука и

журналистика.

 Про музыку и изобразительное искусство в фотографии мы поговорим позднее, когда пойдёт речь о композиции, цвете, тоновом контрасте и других, чисто технических аспектах.

Сегодня же мы продолжим тему информативности фотографии.

 Итак.

Фотография и литература. Вернёмся к «Казни в Сайгоне». Я, вместе с вами, постараюсь написать короткий рассказ на сюжет, заявленный в этом кадре. Рассмотрим детали. Начнём с заднего плана. Несколько целых, и, хочется сказать, свежепостроенных, неразрушенных зданий, которые выглядят довольно современно. Ровное дорожное покрытие. Одинокий автомобиль, несколько прохожих, деревья. На переднем плане мужчина в неопределённой куртке с пистолетом (слева) и мужчина в клетчатой рубахе, чьё лицо перекосила гримаса, а руки связаны (справа). Слева от палача – военный. Он в форме и каске – ошибиться невозможно.

Что нам подсказывает фантазия?

Сюжетов – сотня! Мужчина справа может оказаться простым прохожим, которого пьяные военные случайно «зацепили». Или – шпионом, которого поймали. Или – отцом, который не дал в обиду своё семейство. Или – террористом, который взорвал последний корабль, отплывший из Сайгона, на котором доблестные военные, пожертвовав своими жизнями, отправили в США, спасая от неминуемой гибели, 5000 детей.

Видите, как работает наше воображение? Какая насыщенная, «богатая» фотография!

 Что увидит историк?

Те же детали – дома, машину, деревья, прохожих. Информация второго плана выглядит достоверной. Дальше начинаются сомнения.

Один человек направил на другого пистолет несоветского производства. Рядом – третий мужчина в форме, похожей на форму армии США. По доминирующему сюжету – всё. Не видно – настоящее это фото, или нет. Освещение фона – домов, асфальта, военного в каске – отличается от освещения лиц «палача» и «казнённого». Постановочный кадр? По сути, мы видим лишь, как один мужчина угрожает другому расправой. Эмоции третьего участника (в каске) можно трактовать как угодно.

Взгляд историка всегда (в идеале) непредвзят. Он говорит – что видит, а не то, что хочется увидеть. Факт для профессионального историка не имеет эмоциональной окраски.

Это – удел журналистики. Представить информацию в выгодном свете. Преподать так – чтобы люди:

а) заинтересовались

б) поверили.

Поэтому, историческая наука по духу ближе к юридическому делопроизводству, где действует принцип – «Это ещё надо доказать!». А журналистика – к литературе и изобразительному искусству, которые апеллируют к сюжету и эмоциям.

Снова обратимся к «Казни в Сайгоне». Как это фото обыграли бы в прессе? Не будем читать настоящую легенду снимка, потренируем фантазию.

«Вопиющие беззакония военных!». «Геноцид во Вьетнаме набирает обороты!». «Попрание прав человека в юго-восточной Азии!».

И тому подобное.

В журналистике, как известно, работает своя логика формирования контента. Сначала возникает какая-нибудь тема – актуальная, животрепещущая, привлекательная для читателя/зрителя. Затем журналисты отправляются на поиск фактов или «фактов».

Давайте посмотрим на «Казнь в Сайгоне» с этой позиции.

Довольно легко представить картинку, как какой-нибудь алчный редактор посылает ретивого корреспондента на сбор «доказательств». Тот, используя взятки, договаривается с беспринципным капитаном местного подразделения. Военный инсценирует казнь. Таблоиды тиражируют постановочный снимок. Редактор и корреспондент купаются в деньгах.

Правда, просто?

 Пост получился длинным. Поэтому…

О том, какими принципами мы будем руководствоваться в фотографировании наших детей:  

– будет ли это бесстрастный взгляд наблюдателя,

– или мы подключим фантазию и займёмся постоянным изобретением сюжетов,

– или же выберем фотожурналистику,

– или чудесным образом всё соединим;

 поговорим в следующий раз.

[newstfionline]

A grisly photo of a Saigon execution 50 years ago shocked the world and helped end the war

By Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post, February 1, 2018

Before he pulls the trigger, the South Vietnamese general waves his soldiers out of the way so they don’t get hurt.

He shoos them with the pistol he holds in his right hand, and flicks out his left hand as he approaches the prisoner standing before him.

His men guess what’s coming, and scatter. The general raises the shiny snub-nose .38, points it at the prisoner’s right temple and pulls the trigger.

At that instant on the sunny Thursday of Feb. 1, 1968, in what was then called Saigon, Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams’s camera shutter clicked once, and one of the most powerful pictures of the Vietnam War, or any war, was taken.

In 1/500th of a second, Adams caught the moment the bullet crashed through the Viet Cong prisoner’s skull at about 600 mph, distorting his face, tousling his hair and shoving his head off center.

In the picture, Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the head of South Vietnam’s National Police, stares coldly at his victim. Loan, who had a reputation as a government enforcer, is a thin man with a receding hairline who seems to be wearing a bulky flak vest.

His shirt sleeves are rolled up, showing the sinews in his forearm. The gun looks like it has recoiled slightly upward. Off to the left in the frame, another soldier winces.

The prisoner, whose hands are bound behind him, already has a fat lip, likely acquired when he was captured after leading a brutal commando raid. He wears dark shorts, a plaid shirt and no shoes.

The prisoner, Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem, tumbles to the pavement, blood spouting from his head. Loan calmly holsters his pistol, saying to Adams, “They killed many of my men and many of your people,” and walks away.

Adams waits until the blood stops gushing. “It was gross,” he would say later. He takes a few more pictures of the body then returns to the Associated Press office to drop off his film.

No big deal.

“I thought absolutely nothing of it,” he said in an interview that later became part of a Newseum podcast. “I said, ‘I think I got some guy shooting somebody.’ And, uh, I went to lunch.”

Just another day on the bloody streets of Saigon in the midst of the enemy’s famous Tet offensive--sweeping guerrilla attacks across South Vietnam--during the endless Vietnam War.

“So what?” Adams, a former U.S. Marine from a small town north of Pittsburgh, said later. “It was a war. I’m serious. That’s how I felt. I had seen so many people die at that point in my life.”

Adams did not realize he had taken one of history’s great pictures. He did not know it was a shot that would summarize in a millisecond the savage, seemingly mindless, violence of the war.

He had no idea that his photograph, snapped 50 years ago Thursday, would help change history, and echo throughout his life and that of his surviving subject. “He wasn’t allowed to forget that photograph,” Loan’s son, August, said in a 2008 documentary. “It stuck with him everywhere he went.”

The picture ran on the front pages of many U.S. newspapers, and the footage ran on TV. But it was the photograph, and its frozen portrait of agony, that fueled the antiwar movement and helped end U.S. involvement.

“It just kind of summed up the whole war,” former CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer said in the short film “Eddie Adams: Saigon ‘68” by Douglas Sloan.

“The horrificness of it stops you,” the late Life Magazine photographer Bill Eppridge said in the 2012 documentary. “I think his picture was the moment that changed the war.”

David Hume Kennerly, a fellow Vietnam War photographer who became chief White House photographer and was a friend of Adams’s, compared the picture with Joe Rosenthal’s famous shot of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in World War II.

“Where Joe Rosenthal’s picture represented the heroism … and courage in war and patriotism … Eddie’s picture was exactly the opposite,” Kennerly said in a telephone interview. “Eddie’s picture was the real underbelly of violence and summary execution.… It’s what war is really like.”

“I don’t know that it ended the Vietnam War, but it sure as hell didn’t help the cause for the government,” he said. “One thing I know for sure, anybody who’s ever seen that photo has never forgotten it.”

In 1969, Adams was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the shot.

But he felt terrible about the photo, which he didn’t think was that good, and bitter about the prize, according to interviews he gave over the years.

He believed he had taken far more worthy pictures, and that the execution photo was viewed out of context by most people: The slain Viet Cong prisoner was captured after he reportedly killed a South Vietnamese officer, his wife and six children.

Adams believed he had destroyed Loan’s life.

“Two people died in that photograph,” Adams wrote in Time magazine years later. “The recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.”

“General Loan was … a real warrior,” Adams wrote in a Time eulogy for Loan. “I’m not saying what he did was right, but you have to put yourself in his position…. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time.”

Loan, who later lost a leg in combat, was treated for the injury at Washington’s old Walter Reed Army Hospital in 1969, which outraged some people. Then-Sen. Stephen M. Young (D-Ohio) called Loan a “brutal murderer” and said his treatment in the United States was “a disgraceful end to a … disgraceful episode.”

Loan was university-educated and had become a jet pilot before he was named national police chief. He was married and had five children. After the war, he made his way with his family to the United States and ran a restaurant in Northern Virginia. But the photograph stalked him.

In 1978, the government moved to deport him. “Gen. Loan cold-bloodedly shot and killed another human being,” Rep Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N.Y.) wrote at the time. “By any standard what he did was immoral.”

But Loan had local support and was never deported. Twenty years later, on July 14, 1998, he died at home in Burke, Va., at the age of 67.

Adams, a rough-edged, cantankerous figure who had great fame after the war, also was haunted by the photo, among other things.

In the documentary, he said that when he died he wanted to be buried in his Marine Corps “dress blues” uniform. He wanted a 35mm camera with a wide-angle lens, and he wanted some slow-speed color film.

“Because where I go there’s going to be a lot of light,” he said. “And it [won’t be] from up above, either. Fire, you can photograph really well with a slow-speed film.”

Adams died of Lou Gehrig’s disease on Sept. 18, 2004, in New York City. He was 71. He didn’t fit into his old uniform, his widow, Alyssa, said. But she did bury him with a camera.

[historysisco]

On This Day in History February 1, 1968: Shown live on national television and shown in print media throughout the world, here is a photograph of Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém being executed by South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The photo was taken by Eddie Adams and earned him the 1969 Pulitzer Prize. The photo would forever be known as “Saigon Execution.”

The photo shows the brutality of war first hand and brought that brutality into the homes and offices of the American viewing public. With this image, there was no glorification of or justification to war. Just raw emotion. This photo and other subsequent images and videos would help to build opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States. 

For Further Reading:

Saigon execution: Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief, 1968 by Rare Historical Photos dated May 13, 2014

The Pulitzer Eddie Adams Didn’t Want by Donald R. Winslow from the Lens blogpage of the New York Times dated April 19, 2011

[americana-plus]

Saigon Execution of a Vietcong Terrorist by Saigon Police Chief, 1968

The police chief's entire family had just been murdered by the man he shot.

This terrorist name was known as Captain Bay Lop.  Lop was a member of the Viet Cong. Not just any member, either, he was an assassin and the leader of a Viet Cong death squad who had been targeting and killing South Vietnamese National Police officers and their families.

Lop’s team was attempting to take down a number of South Vietnamese officials. They may have even been plotting to kill the shooter himself, Major General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. It is said that Lop had recently been responsible for the murder of one of Loan’s most senior officers, as well as the murder of the officer’s family.

According to accounts at the time, when South Vietnamese officers captured Lop, he was caught in the act, at the site of a mass grave. This grave contained the bodies of no less than seven South Vietnamese police officers, as well as their families, around 34 bound and shot bodies in total. Eddie Adams, the photojournalist who took the shot, backs up this story. Lop’s widow also confirmed that her husband was a member of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and that he disappeared before the beginning of the Tet Offensive.

[landscape-stories]

LS 13 | Vietnam

About Saigon Execution

www.landscapestories.net