VIETNAM: WORK OF PHOTOGRAPHERS KILLED DURING VIETNAM WAR EXHBITED IN HANOI FOR FIRST TIME.

Record ID: 631258

  • Title: VIETNAM: WORK OF PHOTOGRAPHERS KILLED DURING VIETNAM WAR EXHBITED IN HANOI FOR FIRST TIME.
  • Date: 11th March 2000
  • Summary: CU: PICTURE OF SOUTH VIETNAMESE SOLDIER THREATENING TO KILL VIET CONG SUSPECT
  • Embargoed: 26th March 2000 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: HANOI, VIETNAM
  • Country: Vietnam
  • Topics: Conflict,Arts,History,Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA4J3OFWG30JMBPKOHW80N2G1XV
  • Story Text: The work of 135 photographers killed during two decades of war in Vietnam has gone on exhibition for the first time in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi.
    The exhibition titled "Requiem - the Vietnam Collection" brings together the work of 135 photographers who covered the Indochina conflict from all sides -- and all of whom paid the ultimate price for being eyewitnesses to the horror of war.
    In some cases, the photos came from their last roll of film - their last shot.And more than half of the photographers documented the conflict from the Communist side.
    The theme of the exhibition is hope, healing and history, and is a gift to the Vietnamese people by the U.S.
    state of Kentucky which had the second highest participation in the Vietnam war, per capita, of any state in the country.
    It was Tim Page, a British photojournalist who worked and was wounded in Vietnam, who first decided to collect the photographs of those who died documenting the conflict and publish them as a memorial.
    Page says the exhibition is not about who won or who lost the war.
    "It's not a feeling of feeling vanquished, it's a feeling of the lads and ladies on the wall getting a final resting place, and a lot of them there's been no trace of them."
    To war veteran Richard Lennon, instrumental in bringing the exhibition to Vietnam from his home state of Kentucky, it has been a home coming, a closure on a painful past.
    Twenty-five years after the Vietnam War ended, the images of conflict are still deeply ingrained in the American psyche.
    "It's hard to let go, it was a very different war.For the Americans it was the first war we'd ever lost and I think we truly believed we were invincible."
    When the exhibition opened in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi on Friday (March 10) it was thronged with people curious to see a side of the conflict they had never experienced.
    And none more so than the man who led the Communist forces that captured Saigon in 1975, then capital of the U.S.-backed South Vietnam.
    General Van Tien Dung (pronounced: Zoong), 83-years-old but still in full military uniform, took time to look at each photo in the exhibition.
    "No one wants this to ever happen again," he said.
    Certainly not Hoang Thi Sao whose husband was a combat photographer who travelled with the North Vietnamese forces.
    "I'm very proud of my husband's work, and deeply touched by his pictures, but to this day I still haven't found his remains."
    Russell Burrows, son of perhaps the most renowned Vietnam war photographer Larry Burrows, never found the remains of his father who died in a helicopter crash on the Lao border in 1971.
    It was one of Larry Burrows' pictures that Vietnamese authorities suddenly removed from the exhibition only hours before it was due to open.
    Russell Burrows was puzzled."The picture is of bodies in the foreground, but I can't see why it would be disturbing for them from the political point of view," he said.
    The exhibition will be shown in Hanoi for 10 days after which organisers hope to stage it in the former wartime capital Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
    As Vietnam marks a quarter century since the end of the Vietnam War, the images of that conflict as captured by those who didn't live to see the peace, have become an enduring legacy.
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