Eddie Adams (photographer)

Infobox journalist
name = Eddie Adams


birthname =
birth_date = June 12, 1933
birth_place = New Kensington, Pennsylvania [cite web |last = Lucas, Dean|title = Famous Pictures Magazine - Vietnam Execution|url=http://www.famouspictures.org/mag/index.php?title=Vietnam_Execution|accessdate = 2007-06-01 ]
age =
death_date = death date and age|2004|09|19|1933|06|12
death_place = New York City
occupation = Photojournalism
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credits = Pulitzer Prize-winner
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Eddie Adams (June 12, 1933 – September 19, 2004) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American photographer noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and as a photojournalist having covered 13 wars.

Combat photographer

Adams served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War as a combat photographer. One of his assignments was to photograph the entire Demilitarized Zone from end to end immediately following the war. This took him over a month to complete [Brady "The Scariest Place in the World", pp. 34-35.] .

Pulitzer Prize winning photograph

It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyễn Văn Lém, on a Saigon street, on February 1, 1968, during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive.

Adams won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a World Press Photo award for the photograph (captioned 'General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon'), but would later lament its notoriety.

On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in "Time "::"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths."

:"What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?"' [ [http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2QxNWY0N2ZkY2IxMWJhZGQ4MTU3ZjhlZjg3NTk0NzE= There Are Tears in My Eyes - Eddie Adams & the Most Famous Photo of the Vietnam War, by Jonah Goldberg 1999] ]

Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to Loan's honor while he was alive. When Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a "hero" of a "just cause".

He once said that "I would have rather been a fag known more for the series of photographs I shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to Thailand in a 30-foot boat, only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines." The photographs, and accompanying reports, helped persuade then President Jimmy Carter to grant the nearly 200,000 Vietnamese boat people asylum. He won the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club in 1977 for these series of photographs in his photo essay, "The Boat of No Smiles" (Published by AP) [ [http://www.opcofamerica.org/opc_awards/archive/byaward/award_capa.php The OPC's Robert Capa Gold Medal] ] . Adams remarked, "It did some good and nobody got hurt." [cite web |last = Eddie Adams|title = Interview for PBS|url=http://www.pbs.org/speaktruthtopower/hr_eddie.htm|accessdate = 2007-06-01 ]

Awards

Along with the Pulitzer, Adams also received over 500 awards, including the George Polk Award for News Photography in 1968, 1977 and 1978, and numerous awards from World Press Photo, NPPA, Sigma Delta Chi, Overseas Press Club, and many other organizations.

Adams' legacy is continued through Barnstorm: The Eddie Adams Workshop, the photography workshop he started in 1988.Adams died in New York City from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

ee also

References

;Notes

;Bibliography
*cite book
last = Brady
first = James
authorlink =
coauthors =
title = The Scariest Place in the World - A Marine Returns to North Korea
publisher = Thomas Dunne Books
date = 2005
location = New York City
pages =
url =
doi =
id = ISBN 0-31233-243-2

External links

* [http://www.newseum.org/warstories/interviews/mp3/journalists/bio.asp?ID=22 Voice autobiography of his Pulitzer photograph, the execution]
* [http://www.pbs.org/speaktruthtopower/hr_eddie.htm Interview for PBS]
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/3672428.stm Eddie Adams Photographs]
* [http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04264/382106.stm Eddie Adams obituary]
* [http://www.eddieadamsworkshop.com Eddie Adams Workshop]