As might be expected, there are numerous images of dead, wounded and surrendered South Vietnamese soldiers as well as American POWs. Unsurprisingly, there are no photos of NVA corpses, though several poignant portraits depict men and women who went on to die in the war, sometimes just hours after their pictures were taken. While many photos serve such obvious propaganda purposes, many others depict the brutal reality of the conflict. Their faces are all in shadow, and this lack of specific identity suggests that their heroic charge represents the courage of all NVA troops. In this 1972 photo three NVA soldiers leap over a berm of rubble in Quang Tri, weapons at the ready. The book’s well-chosen cover photo is an artfully composed propaganda action shot by Le Minh Truong. Thus in Another Vietnam we see many beautifully shot but nonetheless propagandistic photos of handsome NVA soldiers mingling with grateful villagers, north Vietnamese militia women standing guard with bayonets at the ready, and resolute Viet Cong guerrillas with captured M-16s and bare feet. To prove to themselves and to their fraternal allies that their cause was righteous.” Page writes, “Their mission was to document the nationalistic cause, the heroic, however grim it had become.
Vietnam photo police chief free#
They owed no allegiance to journalistic objectivity and viewed their photos as weapons in the struggle to free their country. Page notes that while Western “shooters” or “snappers” worked for the international media, NVA and Viet Cong photographers worked for the liberation of Vietnam. In language that is informal and slang-laden as well as honest and insightful, Page explains that while Western and NVA/Viet Cong photographers were alike in many ways, they were nonetheless two distinctly different breeds. Each photographer tells his story-unlike in the Western press, combat photography remained an all-male preserve-in his own unique voice, a story backed by a powerful collection of war photographs.Ĭhapters by Tim Page, a famed Vietnam War combat photojournalist, are interspersed between chapters devoted to individual NVA and Viet Cong photographers.
“I decided that I would try to find those photographers, collect their pictures and record their stories, with the simple goal of adding their images to our memory of the Vietnam War.”Įight NVA and Viet Cong photographers are featured in this coffee-table book of beautifully reproduced black-and-white photos. “The Vietnamese have a long, rich tradition of arts and literature, so I was sure that a fraternity of former war photographers existed in Vietnam, unknown to us in the West,” Niven writes in the book’s introduction. National Geographic’s Another Vietnam attempts to rectify this imbalance by profiling the combat photojournalism of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong photographers.Īnother Vietnam was the brainchild of photojournalist Doug Niven, who went to Vietnam in the 1990s in search of pictures taken by former NVA and Viet Cong photographers. What has long been missing from the pictorial narrative of the war is the work of photojournalists shooting from the other side. Though these pictures by Western photojournalists capture the war’s brutality with a powerful and unremitting intensity, they nonetheless offer a one-sided perspective of the conflict. The best of these photos have become part of America’s collective national memory of the war, for no matter what our age or level of interest in Vietnam, we all know the famous pictures that symbolize the war’s exceptional violence-the Buddhist monk burning himself alive, the South Vietnamese police chief shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head, the naked girl running in agony from a napalm strike, the desperate escapees boarding a helicopter atop the roof of the U.S. A small army of photographers literally snapped millions of pictures over the course of that long and bloody conflict. US$50.00Īmerican, British and other Western photojournalists covered Vietnam like no war before or since. Edited by Doug Niven and Chris Riley with forward by Henry Allen. Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side
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