How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America
The images changed how the world saw Vietnam, but especially how Americans saw their country, soldiers and the war itself, which ended 50 years ago this month.
By The New York Times
Text by Damien Cave
Damien Cave covers global affairs and is based in Ho Chi Minh City.
There are so many ways to describe what photography from the Vietnam War captured and revealed, but maybe it boils down to what Tim O’Brien shared in “The Things They Carried.”
“I survived,” he wrote in one of the book’s stories, “but it’s not a happy ending.”
The war, which formally concluded on April 30, 1975, still elicits grief for all that was burned into memory and reinforced on film.
The most memorable photographs of that era, with its grisly, muddy, cruel jungle war, were shot by a brave global crew with a wide range of political views and backgrounds.
Dickey Chapelle, the first female photojournalist to die in Vietnam, was a Midwesterner who could barely contain her anti-Communism. Tim Page was an irreverent dope-smoking Brit; Henri Huet was French and Vietnamese, and known for his humor and kindness.
Together, their images and those of many others changed how the world saw Vietnam, but especially how Americans saw their country, soldiers and war itself.
Damien Cave leads The Times’s new bureau in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, covering shifts in power across Asia and the wider world.
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