Accusations of fakery in combat photography go back at least to Mathew Brady’s pictures of Civil War battlefields. Brady’s troop of photographers appear to have sometimes moved corpses to compose a better shot. Probably the most famous combat picture of the Second World War was effectively a reënactment. This was Joe Rosenthal’s iconic Iwo Jima photograph. Rosenthal worked for the Associated Press. The famous photograph, taken on February 23, 1945, is of a second flag-raising at the summit of Mt. Suribachi, on the island of Iwo Jima, in southern Japan. Fighting on the island had stopped, so the soldiers in the picture were not under fire, and the action of raising the flag (there is a movie of it) took all of a few seconds. Other photographers were present, and the six men appear to be struggling only because there are too many of them. Everyone wants to be in the picture. Rosenthal sent the film off to Guam, where the negatives were developed. Someone at the A.P. chose the image, cropped the photo, and sent it around the world by radiotelegraph. It appeared on front pages everywhere two days later. Rosenthal had no idea what he had shot. He said he didn’t even look through the viewfinder, just pointed the camera in the general direction of the soldiers. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
The Vietnam experience can almost be summarized by its iconic photographs, images everyone knows; the war in visual shorthand. Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution” was taken on February 1, 1968. The gunman is the South Vietnamese police chief, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, and the man shot is Nguyễn Văn Lém, a fighter in the Viet Cong. Adams worked for the A.P., and the next day his photograph appeared in newspapers around the world. The immediate impact on public opinion is hard to gauge, but, as the war went on, the picture came to stand for the belief that in supporting South Vietnam, the United States was supporting war criminals. Stories circulated that Lém was involved in the assassination of the family of a South Vietnamese officer, although it’s unclear what exactly happened. In any case, Loan may have felt justified in executing the prisoner on sight. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize, basically because his timing was right.
“The Terror of War,” also known as “Napalm Girl,” was taken on June 8, 1972, and famously attributed to the photographer Huỳnh Công Út. The central figure, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, is nine years old. She suffered third-degree burns over much of her body but survived. Út, who was Vietnamese himself, probably saved her life by getting her to a hospital. But the incident was not what we like to think of as a normal act of war. The children were accidentally napalmed by South Vietnamese pilots who mistook a group of fleeing villagers for Viet Cong. And there are doubts that Út was the photographer, although Út has repeatedly maintained that he was. There were (typical for Vietnam) several photographers and reporters present—the children were running toward a gaggle of journalists. A recent documentary, called “The Stringer,” makes a good case, as does an article in last summer’s Rolling Stone, that the photograph was actually taken by a stringer who could not afford to complain when the editor at A.P. attached Út’s name to the picture. Út won a Pulitzer.
No aura of ambiguity hovers over Catherine Leroy’s photographs. Her camera is fearless. This is not to say she did not produce some images that became iconic. She wrote affectionately and religiously to her parents back in France, and her letters give us a look at the person beneath the hard-ass exterior. They also help us understand her admiration for the soldiers, many doomed, whom she worked alongside. She writes to her father that she could have filled “whole pages about ‘my Marines.’ The young marines in particular are very impressive: calm, very relaxed, the tough youths do a real professional job. In these units there are some absolutely crazy heroic acts.”
