Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam
Thy Phu
Duke University Press: 2021
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The iconic images from Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s are burned into our mind’s eye—‘Napalm Girl’ Kim Phuc running naked down Route 1; General Loan firing his pistol point blank into the skull of a Viet Cong sapper; Thich Quang Duc immolating himself in the middle of a Saigon street.

Vietnam was the apex of war photography. It marked the perfect confluence of handheld 35-millimetre cameras, high-speed film, long lenses, rapid radio transmission of images, TV field reporting and free helicopter transport for the hundreds of journalists and stringers who covered the war. Never again would the United States military allow its brutal incompetence to be documented so thoroughly.

• Tags: Issue 27, Thomas A. Bass, Thy Phu, Vietnam