Eddie Adams (photographer) - Pulitzer Prize Winning Photograph

Pulitzer Prize Winning Photograph

It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyễn Văn Lém, 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 (captioned 'General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon'), but would later lament its notoriety. 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 (often with an illustration) to the Eddie Adams picture'.

Anticipating the impact of Adams's photograph, an attempt at balance was sought by editors in 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 far less dramatic image was overlooked and soon forgotten.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag is disturbed by what she sees as the staged nature of the photograph. She writes that 'he would not have carried out the summary execution there had not been available to witness it'. However, Donald Winslow of the New York Times quotes 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 notes 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’'.

On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in Time:

Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to the General's honor while he was alive. When Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a "hero" of a "just cause". On the television show "War Stories with Oliver North" Adams called Gen. Nguyen "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 people asylum. 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" (Published by AP). Adams remarked, "It did some good and nobody got hurt." the photograph was mentioned in the movie Flags of Our Fathers where the old Rene Gagnon says that this photograph was the reason America lost the war in Vietnam just like Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima was the reason America won the Pacific War.