Larry Burrows, Vietnam - Rilegato

Burrows, Larry

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 037541102X ISBN 13: 9780375411021

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2002

Riassunto

The sights and sounds, emotions and tragedy, courage and suffering of the Vietnam War are captured in a powerful collection of photoessays, originally published in LIFE magazine, taken by acclaimed photojournalist Larry Burrows, killed in action in 1971. 35,000 first printing.

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L'autore

Larry Burrows (1926–71) was born in England, went to work at the age of sixteen in the photo lab of Life’s London bureau, and rose to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest photojournalists.

David Halberstam, Burrows’s close friend and comrade in Vietnam, is the author of many books, most recently War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. He lives in New York City.

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Introduction
by David Halberstam, 2002

Larry Burrows first went to Vietnam in 1962, when the war was still very small, and for the Americans at least (if not for the Vietnamese, who had been fighting in some form or another since 1946), still very young. He was thirty-six when he first arrived, just entering his professional prime, and it was the assignment he had always wanted. He had been too young for World War II. He was twenty-four in 1950 when the Korean conflict broke out, and he had tried desperately to go, but had been judged too young and too junior in Life’s pecking order. Vietnam, therefore, was going to be his war. He got there early and staked it out from the beginning, telling his wife, Vicky, that he was going to stay to the end and cover it until there was peace. He was hardly green at the time—he had been photographing as a professional for Life for more than a decade, he had covered violence in the Middle East and the chaotic tribal fighting in the Congo—but this story was going to be his own and he was going to see it through.

Because of that vow, along with his talent, his courage, and his particular feel for the Vietnamese people, he became the signature photographer of that war, a man whose journalism, in the opinion of his colleagues and editors, reached the level of art. He would stay in Vietnam for nine years. More than any other photographer and print journalist, his work captured the different faces of the war; for those of us who were there, opening this book brings the shock of recognition of scenes, some of which took place nearly forty years ago and are now almost forgotten. On one occasion, around 1969, after some seven years there, he had come back to New York and was visiting with his Life colleagues. Someone asked him how the war was going. “Well, you American chaps have quite a problem there. Thank God it isn’t my war.” “Larry,” said Ralph Graves, who was one of his editors, “if it isn’t your war, whose is it?”

Vietnam at the moment of his arrival was not yet that big a story, though it was soon to be the most important story in the world and to stay that way for nearly a decade. The Americans were not yet in a combat role and were still serving as advisers to the South Vietnamese Army, or ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), as it was known. Larry Burrows was pulled to it from the start; he understood that this struggle had only begun, and that it was going to be, whatever the outcome, a bigger war and a much bigger story than anyone back in New York realized. I think he understood the unusually bitter quality of it because it was a civil war; it is in the nature of civil wars to be especially cruel and ugly. You can see the evidence of that in some of his very early photos of Vietnamese tormenting Vietnamese. He also knew the one great truth that the early generation of journalists and photographers who went there understood: that given the particular nature of this war—small units fighting all over the country—it was going to be, if you figured out how to go and look for it, amazingly accessible for a photographer.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 037541102X
• ISBN 13: 9780375411021
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 243