Eddie Adams was an American photographer and photojournalist noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and for coverage of 13 wars. He is best known for his photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Adams was a resident of Bogota, New Jersey.
It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph—that of police chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, summarily executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Vietcong prisoner. This took place 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. Writer and critic David D. Perlmutter points out that "no film footage did as much damage as AP photographer Eddie Adams's 35mm shot taken on a Saigon street... When people talk or write about at least a sentence is devoted to the Eddie Adams picture". Anticipating the impact of Adams's photograph, an attempt at balance was sought by editors at The New York Times. In his memoirs, John G. Morris recalls that assistant managing editor Theodore M. Bernstein "determined that the brutality manifested by America's ally be put into perspective, agreed to run the Adams picture large, but offset with a picture of a child slain by Vietcong, which conveniently came through from AP at about the same time." Nonetheless, it is Adams's photograph that is remembered while the other image was overlooked and soon forgotten. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag was disturbed by what she saw as Loan's staging of the execution in the street for journalists' photographs. She wrote that "he would not have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it" and positioned himself in profile view with the prisoner facing the cameras. However, Donald Winslow of The New York Times quoted Adams as having described the image as a "reflex picture" and "wasn't certain of what he'd photographed until the film was developed". Furthermore, Winslow noted that Adams "wanted me to understand that 'Saigon Execution' was not his most important picture and that he did not want his obituary to begin, 'Eddie Adams, the photographer best known for his iconic Vietnam photograph 'Saigon Execution. Adams would later lament the impact of the photo. On Loan and his photograph, Adams wrote in Time in 1998: Loan moved to the United States, and in 1978, there was an unsuccessful attempt to rescind his permanent residence status. Adams advocated for Loan when the U.S. government sought to deport him based on the photograph, and apologized in person to Loan and his family for the irreparable damage it did to his honor while he was alive. When Loan died, Adams praised him as a "hero" of a "just cause". On the television show War Stories with Oliver North Adams referred to Loan as "a goddamned hero!" He once said, "I would have rather been 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 peopleasylum. He won the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club in 1977 for this series of photographs in his photo-essay, "The Boat of No Smiles". Adams remarked, "It did some good and nobody got hurt." On October 22, 2009 Swann Galleries auctioned a print of Adams' photo of Loan and Lém. Printed in the 1980s, it had been a gift to Adams's son. It sold for $43,200. What many including Adams did not know is that one of many families that Lem and his group executed was the whole family of South Vietnamese Lt. Col. Nguyen Tuan, including his parents and 5 children, except one little boy of 10 years old who survived after being shot in the arm, leg, and head execution style. The little boy, Huan Nguyen, grew up in the U.S and became the first Vietnamese American U.S Navy Rear Admiral. in 2019.
Later
Adams started a photojournalism workshop, The Eddie Adams Workshop in 1988. It reached its thirtieth year in 2017.
Eddie Adams: Vietnam. New York City: Umbrage, 2008. Written and edited by Alyssa Adams..
Eddie Adams: Bigger than the Frame. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017. By Eddie Adams.. With a foreword by Don Carleton, a preface by Alyssa Adams, and an essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker.
Film about Adams
An Unlikely Weapon – documentary feature directed by Susan Morgan Cooper and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland.
