You should not drink and bake

Essay on Documentary Photography from the Vietnam War

Choosing a particular period from 1800 to the present, in what ways has art or design responded to the changing social and cultural forces of that period

In response to the question, this essay will focus on the rise and importance of documentary photography in the Vietnam War, and how it responded to the changes in the social change of yet another war for the country and how it also worked to cause its own social change. It will look into the advances in technology which helped to dub the War as the first to be shot ‘Technicolour’ and also the way it impacted the US publics’ opinion on whether the army should fighting the War at all. It will also question the role of the photographer as merely a documenter or whether they have cause to intervene in the events that they are capturing.

Although colour photography had been used and experimented with for decades before the Vietnam War, the technology was deemed to use a too complex processing period to be used on the scale seen throughout War period. This is shown through the Second World War and the Korean War by being shot in Black and White by photographers, although advances in the technology to process colour photographs made the Vietnam War to be the first shot in predominantly colour images. This set apart the photographs as cutting edge, modern and a war for the new age after the rebuild from the Second World War.

Even before American widespread involvement in the Vietnam War, the country had already been experiencing social change. The 1960’s approached bringing with it new thinking and new opinions, signified especially by the work of Martin Luther King, Jr and his quest for peace and equality in American culture. Following the Second World War America embarked on their fight against communism in their idea of fighting for peace, this culminated in the Cold War in which Vietnam was a hugely important part. Due to the new technologies open to the reporters and photographers in America, the army brought about large scale reporting on the conflict to showcase the fight against communism for the public back home and also for soldiers fighting in different countries around the area. Although intended to boost morale and showcase the war for peace, the American government came to blows with the reporting coming out of the conflict on many occasions.

The Kennedy Administration basically gave its War photographers freedom to document as much as they could and were supplied with all the means to accomplish this.  The government saw this as a win-win situation, sending their own people to the conflict would result in good press and publicity to create backing for their involvement. Although in some cases as the government were releasing press conferences and reports from fight across the Indochina region, the reports from the correspondents in the field frequently told of a different course of events to those released by the government. These reports lead to direct intervention from The Kennedy Administration, which highlighted question marks over the relationship between the government and its troops. It did not help the governments public image being seen to attack the accuracy and trust in the reporters in the field, and in some cases photographers like Philip Jones Griffiths were banned from returning to the war after they had released photographs and reports that shown the Americans and the Army in a bad light.

“Equally documentary photography shows the camera at its most potent and radical. The very subject-matter of the documentary photographer is an index of the contentious and problematic as well as of emotional and harrowing experiences: poverty, social and political injustice, war, crime, deprivation, disaster, and suffering are all difficult areas to photograph and all potentially problematic in the way a photographer will approach their meanings in terms of his or her own assumptions” - Clarke, Graham, The Photograph, Oxford, 1997, page 145

Throughout the reporting of the War, the photos being published from it became more and more violent and these started to become more accepted by the general public, as this was a showcase of the horrors of this war. They became increasingly more violent and bloody than photographs previously seen from WWII and the Korean War that showed a shift in the way the general public accepted this increase in violence as a new norm. In a way this worked to also change the photos that were being taken, as the public became accustomed to this violent images and the press began to respond by providing them with more and more violent images to meet the emerging demand. With this quest for violence coming from an awaiting public back home, the photographer tasked with getting this images began to become more involved with their work, with question marks being brought upon them as to whether they were to be a force for good in their work, to document the horror of war or to simply be an outside observer and show the public what it wants. This really came to a head with the publication of the My Lai massacre photographs. Its events being so horrifying and damning to the American army that details of the massacre did not come to light for over a year and half.

Ronald L. Haeberle was the man that captured this event, which saw the killing of 350+ Vietnamese civilians mostly women and children. Although the killing of civilians was not a new occurrence as many groups and newspapers had published details of this on many occasions, it was the attitude and behaviour of the photographer as well as the soldiers that was really brought in to question throughout these horrifying events. This is really exemplified by the way Haeberle captured one of the most well-known and enduring images of this massacre.

“Guys were about to shoot these people. I yelled, “hold it”, and shot my picture. As I walked away, I heard M16s open up. From the corner of my eye I saw bodies falling, but I didn’t turn to look.” – Ronald L. Haeberle –Lewinski, Jorge, The Camera at War, New York, 1978, page 211

When Haeberle handed in his black and white film to his commanding officers after returning to base, they became censored and cropped when printed in the Army Newspapers, not showing Vietnamese casualties or bodies. Although Haeberle handed his black and white films in, he kept the colour photos for himself, which he later sold to the media. Although the Army tried to cover up the real events of My Lai by reporting that it became a fire fight between US soldiers and Vietcong, the images that surfaced were too shocking and damning for the army to be covered up effectively by senior officials. Intervention from a circling helicopter provided the massacre with outside observers that sought to intervene and expose the atrocity by lobbying with letters and phone calls to senior members of government and press organisations back in the US, which began the official investigation and brought the real events to light. In 1969 with the publication of the official investigation and Haeberle selling his colour photos to the media, the world became outraged with the massacre and the fact that the army tried to cover it up for so long and it dramatically increased the opposition to the US involvement in the war. Question marks were also brought up against Haeberle, with his willingness to part take in these documenting this event and the fact that he made no effort to intervene for the sake of these innocent people.

“The documentary photograph is equally one of the most intimate forms of photography practice and, in turn, one that explicitly associates itself with public space. It assumes a bond between reader and subject, buoyed by an assumed mandate not just to record, but to expose; the ‘camera with a conscience’ Clarke, Graham, The Photograph, Oxford, 1997, page 145

Whether this was a psycological response to the horrors already witnessed in the Vietnam War or the photographers’ response to the demand for more and more violent photos back home remains to be seen. But from this perspective it looks to be that both have an adverse effect on one another that created a new social acceptance to the point where it went too far.

The government was losing support for their involvement in the War and this was fully compounded by the publication of the photo of Kim Phuc by Nick Un in 1972. The images from My Lai shocked the world, but the photograph of Kim Phuc running from a napalm attack became one of the most iconic images of the war and photography itself.

“As soon as she saw me, she said: “I want some water, I’m too hot, too hot,” – in Vietnamese, “Nong qua, nong qua!” And she wanted something to drink. I got her some water. She drank it and I told her I would help her. I picked up Kim and took her to my car. I ran up about 10 times to Cu Chi hospital, to try and save her life. At the hospital, there were so many Vietnamese people – soldiers were dying here. They didn’t care about the children. Then I told them: “I am a media reporter, please help her, I don’t want her to die.” And the people helped her right away.” –Ut, Nick, Lucas, Dean, 2007,www.famouspictures.org/mag/index.php?title=Vietnam_Napalm_Girl

The group of children were making their way from a village that has been overtaken by North Vietnamese forces, as they were moving, a South Vietnamese plane armed with napalm moved to attack the group believing them to be hostile forces. The image of a naked young girl screaming, running from an attack that should have killed her became a haunting reminder of the horrors of war. Even though it had been seen earlier in the conflict that the public back home were coming accustomed to more and more violent images, the sense of helplessness and sheer terror in these childrens’ faces really brought the war to a new reality. Although in this instance the photographers motives were never questionable as Un basically saved the girls life and continued to visit her up to 3 years after the attack. The photograph became so damning that President Nixon tried to question the authenticity of Uns’ work and the photograph himself, but the damage was already done in the public view and this essentially put the last nail in the coffin for the US involvement in the War before their evacuation in the fall of Saigon.

“Did America lose the war because of its photographers quest for peace?”

– Rainer Fabian, Hans-Christian Adam, Images of war: 130 years of war photography, 1985

Although this began at looking at how photographers responded to a social change, being involved in large-scale war, upon further and deeper insight in to the attitudes of the photographers and their audience it became apparent that both influenced each other. As by the end of the war the public were not afraid to speak out anymore, the rise of Martin Luther King Jr, the equality movement and marches protesting government involvements, gave the public a chance to have their voice heard. The photographer changed the opinion of the public, and the public changed the opinion of the photographer to bring about a real synthesis through media in a way that had never been seen before. Resulting in a large collection of photographs that would change the social outlook of the world for decades after the conflict ended.

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