People have always wanted to believe certain things about the nature of war. It’s happened since the days of Troy. Heroism and tragedy, cruelty and fear, courage and defeat. All photographers hate those images that follow them like phantoms for the rest of their lives because of the mystery and scenic adversity it captures. Eddie Adams lived his entire life tormented by the snapshot he took in 1968, of a general from the Saigon police, at the precise moment he’s firing point-blank at the temple of a Viet Cong prisoner with his hands tied behind his back. Due to the impact, the victim involuntarily tightens his face a second before his body begins to collapse. The photographer Nick Ut, from the Associated Press, could never forget the image of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, running naked on a road close to the small village of Trang Bang. In 1994, Kevin Carter took a photograph in Africa of an emaciated Sudanese child collapsed in an open field, less than a kilometer away from an ONU feeding center, while a vulture stalks her in the background. He won the Pulitzer for that photograph, and one month later he committed suicide. Robert Capa would never be able to overcome “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman”—the one they wound up calling “The Falling Soldier”—the best war photograph of all times.
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