Eddie Adams and the Saigon Execution
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Eddie Adams was born in New Kensington in nineteen thirty-three and served as a Marine Corps combat photographer during the Korean War. He eventually relocated to New York and built a career that produced more than five hundred awards, making him one of the most published photographers of his time. But he is remembered for a single image.
On February first, nineteen sixty-eight, during the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, Adams was standing on a Saigon street when South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised a pistol and shot a Viet Cong prisoner in the head at point-blank range. Adams pressed the shutter. The photograph ran on front pages around the world the next morning and became one of the defining images of the Vietnam War, and one critic argued that no film footage did as much damage to the war's public standing.
Adams later said the image haunted him, that it had destroyed Loan's life while telling only half a story. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it in nineteen sixty-nine.
