A Remembrance of Fallen Friends

The song was “His Eye is On the Sparrow,” sung beneath the birch and fir trees at the Eddie Adams Farm by Leah Latella. The occasion Sunday afternoon was the annual ceremony remembering six photojournalists killed in Vietnam, their names inscribed into a gray slate table, their friends and colleagues among the crowd gathered together on the grass. “These were our eyes,” said Ray Harrell, presiding over the gathering as a Native American ritual, his gray hair in long braids. “You are our eyes.”

He recalled the pictures of Vietnamese “Boat People” that Adams made in the final days of the conflict, which drew worldwide attention to the desperate refugee crisis: “He brought the boat people to America. If his eyes had not been there, they would have been lost.”

Then there was silence, and Nick Ut stepped forward and placed a sunflower on the stone table for his brother, AP photographer Huynh Thanh My. Sarah Burrows left one for her grandfather, Life magazine’s Larry Burrows. Others were placed for Henri Huet, Michael Laurent and Kent Potter. Also remembered were more recent losses: Sandy Colton, veteran of Stars and Stripes and the AP; and Workshop founder Eddie Adams, gone since 2004.

Eddie’s son, August Adams, wore his father’s iconic black fedora and stepped forward (accompanied by half-sister Susan) to place it beside the flowers. A black balloon was released into the air for Adams, a red one for Colton, followed by scores of yellow balloons in honor of the fallen photojournalists.

As ever, it was a profoundly affecting moment among the crowd of photojournalists, friends and family, and a dramatic illustration of what can be at stake in this profession. Many tears were shed around the stone. The annual ceremony had not yet been established when Getty conflict photographer John Moore was a Barnstorm student in 1990, but as a former longtime member of AP, he was moved Sunday by the remembrance in 2009.

“When you’re a student, you have no way of knowing how you will react when confronted with all the horrible things you will see in conflicts. It’s all just theoretical,” Moore said afterwards. “I really do have a strong emotional feeling for all of my AP colleagues, even though it was another war a long time ago. Having covered a lot of conflict the last few years, I feel a certain kinship with them.”

Steve Appleford

Publishing 'Vietnam'

The career of Eddie Adams spanned decades and genres, from the arrival of the Beatles in America to the private fishing spot of Fidel Castro, but he remained best-known for his history-making work in Vietnam. His shocking photograph of an execution on the streets of Saigon helped shift U.S. opinions on the war and awarded Adams the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. But he had been in the country for years, with a larger body of work to document his time there.

This year saw the release of “Eddie Adams: Vietnam,” edited by Alyssa Adams and Hal Buell, his longtime editor at the Associated Press. The book was published by Umbrage Editions, founded by Nan Richardson, who appeared Sunday afternoon at Barnstorm. Alyssa and Buell (later joined by Claudia DiMartino) discussed the making of the book:

Didn’t Eddie have mixed feelings about collecting his pictures into a book?

Hal Buell: I don’t recall him ever being pleased with any book he was ever involved with. I always thought that with “Speak Truth to Power,” his portraits really gave a dimension to the story it certainly would not have had without them. But he didn’t see it that way. He got into a squabble over the cover or title. With Eddie, he would get pissed off about this, and it would spread out like ink on a blotter. But the pictures were really wonderful. You go out and make 100 portraits and every one is different? That’s really something.

Did Eddie talk about doing books?

Alyssa Adams: He talked to a couple of publishers and tried to put a book together, and every time they would get so far, and he would just rip it up. And that would be the end of it.

HB: I used to give him a hard time. He’d say, “I’ve got the first paragraph …” and then he’d dictate this 25 words. And I’d say, What about the other 60,000? What are we going to do about those? (laughs)

It seems that since he didn’t do many books in his lifetime, and unless you were really in the know, you might know his work from only a handful of pictures.

HB: I don’t know if that’s really true. When I met Eddie for the first time in 1963, he had come to the AP from the Philadelphia Bulletin, and I had come back from Asia. We just connected and did a lot of good things. But at that point, Eddie was a very well-known photographer. He already had a wall full of awards that he used to make fun of and hang in his bathroom.

He did not promote his own work per se, but he did promote his ideas of photography and what photography meant. He sometimes used his own pictures in that, but Eddie was always dissatisfied with his work. That was one of his driving forces. Sometimes that inhibited him because he didn’t think he was good enough, it should be better, or ‘Did I miss this?’ -- all the anxieties that photographers feel.

How did the Vietnam book come together?

AA: The idea was to put a retrospective book together. Honestly, I hadn’t seen a lot of Eddie’s pictures, because he had his favorites and those were the ones that I saw. It wasn’t until after he passed away that I saw more –- there’s still pictures I’ve never seen. It just became obvious that Vietnam was the thing to focus on first.

Not only did we find his pictures, we found his diaries. Hal had once interviewed him about the picture, so you really hear Eddie’s voice a lot in this because there were other pieces we had to put together.

HB: The idea was: This is how photographers covered Vietnam, as shown by Eddie Adams. I did a lot of research into the newspaper files. Eddie wrote a lot of stories -– or he called in stories that others wrote. Eddie was not a bad writer. That provided us with a lot of information. There was a lot in the journals, but the journals kind of ended at his first tour in Vietnam, and they were a little cryptic. But there was a flavor in the journals that was very important, and very Eddie.

His most famous picture won the Pulitzer, but was there a general quality to his work that the execution picture does not capture?

Claudia DiMartino: I absolutely love his portrait of Mother Teresa holding a baby. That is the antithesis of the Saigon execution picture, and it shows Eddie’s range. He can lock into that sense of intimacy and emotion that you don’t get in a picture of a guy shot on the street. And his photo essay on the boat people, that’s a tremendously touching story and one that showed great courage on his part to cover.

HB: The Saigon execution picture is not like Eddie’s pictures. It was his signature picture because of its fame, but Eddie was especially effective when he could put a picture together.

Was there a picture you especially liked that you’d never seen before?

AA: Yeah, there’s one of a man with a wife on his back as they’re fleeing. I had never seen that picture. I don’t think anybody ever saw it before.

Are other books planned?

AA: Not as of yet, but I just donated the archives to the University of Texas. I’m hoping we can spend a couple of years and do that retrospective book. I also think it would be fun to do a book just of his AP images.

HB: I don’t want to sound conceded, but I guess I will: I think Eddie did his best work at AP.

Steve Appleford

Photo Session!

“I want everyone between the pumpkins!” Scott Allen of the Black Team was shouting, attempting to help direct a couple of hundred Barnstormers for a group photo: students, teachers, volunteers, most of them with cameras and ideas of their own. As they gathered in random formation in front of the Barn, some climbed onto the roof, stood on chairs, sat on the grass and generally crowded together as the sunlight slipped in and out of the clouds. The lucky photographer was Mark Kettenhoffen, another member of the Black Team and a Nikon employee, with five big strobes and a nice camera. After a half-dozen frames, the photo was done.

Steve Appleford

“Mr. President, Will You Show Me the Love?”

London-born photographer Platon made a playful, and triumphant return to the Eddie Adams Workshop as Saturday's final speaker. He was carried to the podium wearing a pork-pie hat by the esteemed photo editors MaryAnne Golan and Scott Thode. “I’m always amazed to be invited back after last year’s atrocities,” Platon said. He also noted this week’s passing of the influential magazine photographer Irving Penn, telling students, “Of course, losing someone that great means passing the torch onto you guys.”

He then shared images from throughout his career, shooting celebrities and politicians, from Barack Obama and George W. Bush to Willie Nelson stoned and Pamela Anderson draped in a U.S. flag. He recounted photographing Michelle Obama and his mortified apology after asking the new First Lady to “bare her soul.” She was fine with it. “She kissed me on the cheek, and she said, ‘I’m just Michelle.’”

Platon described meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He was quite nice. We talked about the Beatles. He said his favorite song was ‘Yesterday.’ And I gave him a cuddle.” As his brooding image of actor Christopher Walken filled the screen, Platon recalled, “He was weeeird!” Walken was the only celebrity ever to arrive an hour early (and alone) for a shoot, and then went through Platon’s cabinets. Dustin Hoffman sent the photographer’s mother flowers on her birthday, Prince handed him a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet, and P. Diddy demanded Platon turn off a classic Miles Davis CD so that he could primp in the mirror to one of his own.

One particularly noteworthy assignment was a session with President Bill Clinton for the cover of Esquire. It was to be Clinton’s final editorial portrait sitting in office. Their meeting would be in a New Jersey hotel, cleared out for the occasion, and Platon wore his father’s 1974 suit. Esquire requested a simple, undistorted head-shot for the cover.

After enduring the inevitable security measures, and the spectacle of Secret Service agents giving play-by-play for Clinton's every step, the pictures went as planned. Platon reached for the wide-angle lens the magazine warned him not to use, turning to his assistants, as he recounted at the Barn: “Lads, will you pass me the ‘portrait lens’ – double code.”

He lifted the camera once more and asked Clinton, “Mr. President, will you show me the love?”

The resulting image, which Esquire put on the cover, had the president's crotch in the center of the frame. Many saw Phallic symbolism in the way his chair hung below him in the picture, as if reflecting Clinton’s recent troubles with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and impeachment trial. “He was a rock and roll president, and I was a new bred of portrait photographer," Platon said. "Putting us together was dangerous.”

Larry king called the photo “disgusting” and brought investigative journalist Bob Woodward on CNN to analyze the insidious image. Platon’s reputation was secure.

Steve Appleford

Bring On the Games

Sports are a great American tradition, but for photojournalists aiming to document the great contests of 2009, it’s crucial to look beyond the obvious and familiar. That was the message Saturday night from sports photographer Al Bello, who urged students to step outside their comfort zones and experiment with gear, angles, lighting, remote cameras, shutter speeds, ISO setting, anything. “Try something different,” Bello said. “If you make no mistakes, you’re not trying.”

Bello, the chief sports photographer for Getty Images, whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek and elsewhere, sounded much like a coach as he breezed through a presentation of dynamic images from his career. He’s captured unusually vivid sports photographs by setting up cameras on catwalks above boxing rings, on the floor of tennis tournaments, he's strobed bull-riders inside arenas, created a series of boxer portraits on Polaroid film (“Rest in peace, Polaroid”), and shot into the sun at baseball games.

“Angles are huge in sports photography. A pitcher pitching is very boring. You might want to spice it up sometimes,” Bello said. “You’ve got to put the work in to get lucky.”

Bello also reminded students to take full advantage of the Barnstorm experience. The professionals among the faculty and staff are here to help. “You learn from the people in this room,” he said. “You learn by asking questions. It’s a world of knowledge in this room.”

At the end of his talk, Bello said that after all the images of war and sadness presented earlier in the day, he had one more story to share: “I need to make you guys happy again. I want to take you to Santa Clause school!” What followed was a playful multi-media slide show of his pictures and sound from two days he spent at a Michigan Santa Clause academy. Turns out sports are not the only way to have fun.

Steve Appleford

Foreign Tongues

John Moore's career as an international conflict photographer began in Central America, he told students gathered at the Barn today. "I learned Spanish the old-fashioned way: I got myself a girlfriend and six months later I was all set."

Moore, now a senior staff photographer for Getty Images, is also a proud alum of the Eddie Adams Workshop, passing through the program in 1990. Less than a year later, he was working abroad. This decade, he spent three years living and working in and around Pakistan, and was present at the 2007 assassination in Pakistan of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and barely escaped injury in that explosion. He was also the first photographer allowed into the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad after the prisoner abuse scandal exploded in 2004.

Moore noted how tightly the military has tried to control media access: "The rules are not the same as when Eddie Adams was in Vietnam, we all know that." Moore still managed to bring back some searing black-and-white and color images from Abu Ghraib and other U.S. prisons in Iraq. On Saturday, Moore also showed pictures from the streets of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sudan, with angry Muslim protesters in Pakistan seeming to lunge towards Moore's camera lens. "To be fair," he said, "most Pakistanis are very moderate."

Despite his success shooting overseas conflict, Moore is content to be working increasingly in the U.S., photographing such major national issues as health care reform. "There is so much happening in the U.S. right now," said Moore, who is based in Denver. "There's all kinds of stuff to do in your own backyard."

Steve Appleford

Words and Pictures

"I always consider myself more of a journalist than a photographer," Pulitzer Prize-winner Carolyn Cole said during Saturday's first session of Barnstorm presenters. "I don't have the natural eye like many do, and it's something I've had to work on." It's clearly been working, with far-flung international assignments as a Manhattan-based photographer for the Los Angeles Times, with tours through Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other trouble spots.

She showed a selection of that work, including a series on Afghan women, many still draped under burkas, but others not. She said one Afghan husband assured her that he would kill his own wife if she ever appeared in public without the traditional garment. But as Cole displayed the image of two smiling Afghan women outdoors without the head covering, she said other women "were expressing more freedom from day to day."

She's covered local and international news for the L.A. Times since the mid-90s. Her series of pictures from the civil crisis in Liberia was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer for feature photography. Some things are closer to home: In the U.S., she's covered everything from the OJ Simpson civil trial to high stakes presidential politics. And as part of her job at the Times, Cole is also called on for the occasional celebrity portrait, too often with too little time and a different set of problems. "This is a different kind of challenge for me. I usually have five minutes in an ugly hotel room."

Steve Appleford