The Photo
On the afternoon of 29 April 1975, Hubert van Es, a Saigon-based photographer for United Press International, took the iconic photo of Operation Frequent Wind of an Air America UH-1 Huey on a rooftop picking up Vietnamese evacuees. The building in the photo has often been identified as the US Embassy, but this is incorrect. The building was, in fact, the Pittman Apartment building at 22 Gia Long Street (now 22 Lý Tự Trọng Street), which was used as a residence by various embassy CIA and USAID employees. Hubert van Es' photo is frequently used in political cartoons commenting on US foreign policy.
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Evacuation of Vietnamese by Air America on 29 April 1975. Photo: Hubert van Es / UPI
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Rooftop of 22 Gia Long Street in 2002
Read more about this topic: Operation Frequent Wind
Famous quotes containing the word photo:
“A photo of someone else’s childhood,
a garden in another country—world
he had no part in and has no power to imagine:
yet the old man who has failed his memory
keens over the picture— ‘Them happy days—
gone—gone for ever!’”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this—as in other ways—they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)