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Views from Inside a War

Museum of Art Presents a "Requiem"

By Jack Cantey

Fort Wayne Reader

2007-05-08

He looks like a kid – the definition of "fresh faced" youth. There is a grin on his face and a swagger in his step. He's not cocky, but he's got confidence to spare. In another place or at another time, James Farley would be somewhere else, doing something much different. But this is not another time or place. This is 1965 and Farley, with his grin, is carrying a pair of M-60 machine guns across Da Nang airbase to the helicopter of which he is the crew chief.

The black-and-white photograph described above is the first in a series taken by British photojournalist Larry Burrows for Life magazine that details a ride aboard the helicopter Yankee Papa 13. The series continues with Farley opening fire with his gun as the chopper approaches their landing zone. (This is an extraordinary photograph that is literally taken from outside the helicopter; Burrows devised a special camera mount on a rig that was attached to Farley's gun. Burrows triggered it from behind the crew chief with a remote cable.) The third photo – which was also the magazine cover image – shows how wrong things could go in an instant. From inside the aircraft, we see Farley screaming to his unseen gunner. His M-60 is jammed and two wounded crew members lie at his feet. The series ends as it began, with a solitary image of Farley. This photograph, however, tells a much different story. In a supply shack, the young crew chief sits with his head in his hands. He is weeping.

This quartet of images from the Vietnam War is just one example of the poignant and – sadly – relevant works that are currently on view at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina features photographs, mostly black-and-whites, taken of the conflicts that engulfed that region from the 1950s through the fall of Saigon in 1975. This is a unique exhibition, though. All of the images were captured by photographers who were killed or reported missing during this time. Horst Faas and Tim Page, who were photographers in Vietnam themselves, collected thousands of photos from both sides of the war and edited a book with the same title as the exhibition. Their book caught the attention of the George Eastman House who has purchased the photographs and is touring this show around the nation.

Burrows, along with Robert Capa, was one of the most respected and renowned western photographers to be killed in action in Vietnam and Indochina. He began working for Life when he was 16; his job was to bring tea to workers in the photo lab. During his remarkable career, Burrows frequently found himself working in the midst of combat, whether it was in the Congo, the Middle East, or during his nine years covering the war in Vietnam. He was troubled, as many war photographers have been, by the role of a passive observer in the middle of so much human destruction.
"Do I have the right to carry on working and leave a man suffering," Burrows rhetorically asked during a 1969 BBC-TV interview. "To my mind, the answer is no, you got to help him… I wonder whether it is my right to capitalize, as I feel, so often, on the grief of others. But then I justify, in my own particular thoughts, by feeling that I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through, then there is a reason for doing it."

In February of 1971, Burrows backed up his talk by rescuing a Vietnamese soldier from a burning personnel carrier. The next day, Burrows board a helicopter with fellow photojournalists Henri Huet, Kent Potter, and Keizaburo Shimamoto. Due to poor weather, the pilot lost his way and they were shot down over enemy positions. Burrows was 44 years old.

Huet, born in Vietnam to a French father and Vietnamese mother, is responsible for some of the most powerful and surprising images in Requiem. Particularly, a photo he took of an American paratrooper's dead body being airlifted out of a jungle by a helicopter is stunning in its composition and impact. It is nearly impossible not to be moved by such an image. The photograph is titled “Silhouette of Death.”

Requiem will be on view in the Teeple, South, and Prints & Drawing Galleries at the Museum of Art through July 22, 2007. The highlights of upcoming related programming includes Friday Nite Films (June 1, 8, and 15 at 7:30pm) featuring Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and We Were Soldiers, and a presentation by photographer Roger Mattingly (June 10 at 2pm), who took an iconic portrait of Larry Burrows near the Laos border just days before his death.