On February 29, Washington state health officials announced what they believed to be the first death by the new coronavirus in the United States. As of March 31, the official number of national deaths was 3,173. More, they noticed the media, that lives lost in the 9/11 attacks. A month later, on April 28, the United States showed its millionth case of covid-19 and recorded his 58365 death from the virus. Now we had passed the deaths of the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War. By May 27, the coronavirus had killed more than 100,000 people in the United States.
As the outlets marked the dark virtual milestones, photojournalists fought for greater tactics to overcome the devastation. The last image of the crisis has eluded us.
The Great Depression had “Migrant Mother” and World War II “Raised the flag at Iwo Jima.” The AIDS crisis had “The Face of AIDS,” which depicts the death of David Kirby; On September 11 he had “Falling Man”; and the war in Syria has Alan Kurdi. But now, when the country is in hibernation and hospitalized patients are largely banned, how can photographers understand incomprehensible figures?
“War is 95% boredom and 5% natural terror, from a journalist’s point of view,” says David Hume Kennerly, who won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for his feature film from The Vietnam War. CJR spoke to Kennerly and 3 other prominent photojournalists of this conflict, Art Greenspon, Robert Hodierne and David Burnett, to ask what classes we can report from Vietnam to cover today’s invisible killer and the absence of public suffering.
Conversations have been changed for longer duration and clarity.
We just spent a hundred and fifty thousand deaths in the United States. Why are those last fifty thousand deaths less remarkable to us than those between 90 thousand and ones between 90 thousand and ones?
Art Greenspon: You know, Covid is covered like a war, but a war is different, at least to my delight in the Vietnam War. These are numbers, tactics and troop movements. With the virus, hounds focused on the number of hospitalizations, the number of new cases, the amount of tests. Just numbers, numbers, numbers. And I thank Governor Cuomo for referring to this all the time at his press conferences. “Today we have lost a thousand other people.”
Robert Hodierne: About the fourth word of Judy Woodruff’s [PBS presenter] every night is the new checkered count. It’s another one from the war. No funeral
When a man killed in Vietnam, there was a big exaggeration on the way home. The coffin covered with the flag and the bug game faucets. The circle of relatives won the flag and they all piled up for the funeral. It’s a very classic form of mourning.
Covid, you take your enjoyed to the hospital and see him again.
David Hume Kennerly: I think the challenge with numbers in general is that they don’t fear the genuine person. It’s something I’ve been thinking about in my total career. When I found out it was, I think, one of the great cyclones in Bangladesh or eastern Pakistan or whatever at the time, like five hundred thousand people most killed. There’s no way to perceive that. I don’t think we sense the immensity of that, and they all use the same markers. Now we’ve reached the death toll in Vietnam. Now it’s more than the total of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s all b.s.
What’s missing from our photo cover?
Kennerly: Many funerals take position and families can’t even be there, so they strip it are other people who cry over a grave. Like the big moment with Jackie Kennedy in the grave, stuff like that. You’re not going to see him.
I didn’t because I’m over seventy. I just tried to do it. I’ve hung my ass enough without being hit by an invisible presence, you know, and maybe give it to someone else. But there are a lot of wonderful photographers looking to take this picture, and I think it’s probably more frustrating for them because we don’t have a signing moment.
If you can still live by doing this, it’s less difficult to wage war with a palpable action right in front of you. Smoke, chimney and fear.
I know the other people who took the best lovely photos of all time. “Saigon Execution” through Eddie Adams, “Napalm Girl” through Nick Ut, Joe Rosenthal from the hoisting of the flag of Iwo Jima. And those are photographs that are at their center and soul. And we don’t have that moment right now.
A recent best example of the strength of the symbol on a scenario like this would be the young Syrian refugee on the beach. Or the Salvadoran father and boy who drowned looking to cross the border. I don’t think any of those types of symbols have become an effect of coronavirus plague. Most other people die in nursing homes and hospitals. It’s a medical environment.
David Burnett: There are no cataclysms of falling bombs, explosive grenades, rifle chimney or fighting. It’s a kind of noise cancellation. It’s much more internal and hellish. We are reviewing to locate anything in number one, to give a concept of the extent to which the lives of so many other people have been seized and destroyed. It’s not a simple thing if you’re the photographer. You are reviewing to give a representation of anything that is, in a way, very physical. But the feeling is a little metaphysical: it’s about involving anything, so that other people perceive it, without exaggerating the body component. It’s about making an exit to locate anything representative.
In Vietnam, there were visual moments of wonderful panic and tension in combat or the moments after combat when you can see the effect. And here, it’s all been the hospital. There are probably some alarms that are triggered if you receive intensive care or something, however basically, everything exists at another point of peace.
Hodierne: The iconic symbols of Vietnam that worried the sick were like Art Greenspon’s photograph of the jungle clearing. Everyone got his head down and a boy raised his arms. John Olsen’s photograph of Hue during the Tet of a tank with dead and wounded men is a pretty harsh symbol of death in battle. But I don’t know how to compare the two. I think the photographers who go to those hospitals are very brave. Taking shots in a fighting scenario is quite scary and quite dangerous. But at least you know where the danger comes from. You know where the shots come from, how to escape, how to protect yourself. In the hospital, no matter how well you’re dressed in PPE, it’s always a risk. How do you empty your cameras? I’m glad I don’t have to do this.
Greenspon: Where’s Life magazine? Where’s Jimmy Breslin from the Daily News? They used to do non-public tests, you know, in the big photograph. I think when you do remote ratings and you do things over the phone, and that becomes culture, you’ll get journalism about thirty thousand feet. How many photographers and hounds have lost their lives covering the greedy epidemic?
It is also typical of Vietnam. There were six hundred journalists, but the maximum of them did not pass into the countryside. They were pleased to move on to the Five O’Clock Follies and cover them remotely with documents and numbers.
My children are now twenty-one years old. I keep telling them: you have to be careful with this, it’s the biggest story of your life, it’s perhaps the biggest story of my life. I’m thinking about 1968 and this trauma series. You know, the protests, the anti-war protests, then the assassination of Martin Luther King, then the assassination [of Robert] Kennedy. There’s this series of punches.
But it’s different. It’s a little scarier. We focus on the total situation, its omnipresence. But the secret of an iconic photograph is to make it very uncom public and to explain a larger symbol through an intimate portrait of a situation.
In May 1968, I was shot in the face in a Saigon cemetery the same day Co Rentmeester (Life) was wounded and Charlie Eggleston (UPI) was killed. I guess we got too close. Journalists have suffered heavy losses covering at-risk stories. Maybe they are now, but I’m not reading about it. For what?
I don’t see those stories that tell human content. When I was a radio journalist, my editors used to tell me, what does this mean for the street kid? And when you do journalism at thirty thousand feet, you don’t stick to the guy on the street. Now it’s devastating, the links to systemic racism. Covid is ravaging our black and brown communities. Who tells this story from within the community? Okay, it’s very difficult as a photographer to approach because of the hypaa and patient confidentiality, however, I think a journalist can come and maybe a photographer can come in.
Someone has to tell the story of the chimney station, the EMT, the church that does the tests and the other people who die on the stairs on the fifth floor that are a hundred degrees away. Who’s telling those stories? Where is the story of the inner retirement home, about other people who expect to die and who are not with their loved ones? We saw the image from the outside, you know, of other people looking to get in. But what about the history of the interior, those older people? What’s it like to be an older person?
Breslin would be at that chimney station and he’d be driving with the ambulances and chimney trucks that will come out of the fifth floor on a ladder because they couldn’t get him down the stairs or something. He’d tell that story. And that would be very touching. That would be very connected. So, maybe that’s what I’m talking about, it’s connectivity.
Now, this may have to do with how the design of journalism has changed. I deserve to wonder if I’d be willing to threaten my life to get this iconic greedy photo. Because what are the rewards? It’s hard to make a living as a graphic reporter in those days.
Sometimes the last photograph of an occasion doesn’t seem until later. With 9/11, it’s not transparent that “Falling Man” is everything.
Hodierne: There are photographs of the Vietnamese era that I think everyone knew at the time. The little woman was burned, running naked towards the photographer. I think everyone identified that this photograph was important. And the picture of the Saigon police leader blowing the brains of a Viet cong prisoner. You knew instantly. Since World War II, “Raising the Flag in Iwo Jima” was published without delay in every newspaper in the country, on stamps and everything. You didn’t have to wait on that. But I think you’re right about that. I still haven’t noticed the definitive image, which I think, you know, we’ll take a look at five years from now and say it’s like the “Man who fell” understands it.
If the challenge component of capturing the ultimate photographs of the pandemic is that so much suffering is internal. Or that our faces are covered?
Hodierne: Well, yes, but the eyes. Somehow, this allows you even more in the eyes. When you look at all the most productive photographs of war, it’s the eyes of those guys. This is what we call the two thousand-meter look. You know, David Douglas Duncan. Photographs of Marines in Korea. It’s the eyes that attract you.
Or I think you can make very smart portraits of other people with their mask if you stand 8 feet with a 105-millimeter lens. Ask him to remove the mask. The mask doesn’t protect them, it protects you.
Kennerly: With Ebola, the fact that you’re on the line between life and death was much more palpable. Here, all the main players are the protective clothing: glasses, masks. So you can get intense intensity in the eyes of doctors, nurses and caregivers and all that. A sterile environment does not create an intelligent image.
Burnett: You realize how much we depend on hunting someone in their eyes, in their face, and it becomes a wonderful way to talk about what other people are going through, what they think. And if the mask is in place, well, I haven’t noticed a mask symbol touching me.
Many hounds believe that story weariness has a real challenge with greedy coverage. Have you ever had this challenge with Vietnam?
Burnett: I didn’t come to Vietnam until 1970. I was just 24 when I went there. He looks young, but I was probably three-quarters of the soldiers. Even then, it was still a wonderful story. It was a story that required attention. In 71, there was the invasion of Laos, in 1972 the Easter offensive. It was a story that went on in some way; every week, it was the great story.
It’s obviously a gigantic story with all those other elements. You have other people dying. You have other people out of work. How does the economy and the economy return? We may have had enough, but it’s each in every facet of their lives. We could be tired of that. He’s not going to be tired of us for a while.
Kennerly: That’s not how you treated the stage when you were in Vietnam. In the end, you knew that when you were hit on the road, you can be beaten, unlike that, where you can go to the grocery store or go to a street protest and get the virus.
Covid’s fatigue has been replaced by this other wonderful story. People don’t like spending time at home. And other people are unemployed now and have no money. But now it’s about the murder of George Floyd, which is a massive story. You have this tectonic change; other people have the emotional urge to faint and protest. A symbol cannot necessarily tell this story in a single frame. It’s too widespread. It’s too big, in a way.
What visual effects have been most productive on the pandemic so far?
Greenspon: The cover of the New York Times when we reached a hundred thousand dead. He hit me like a ton of bricks. How brilliant those non-public comments were. There is someone with whom each and every reader can simply stick to and be extremely cheerful or saddened to never meet.
Hodierne: Some of the photos of hospital workers sitting exhausted, their faces on their hands. Some of the photographs of other seniors in nursing homes, with their faces glued to the window, their grandchildren, I think are hard and lasting images.
Burnett: The Philip series, filmed at a Brooklyn funeral home, for the New York Times. Just the guy from the funeral home, surrounded by all those bodies. It was an ultra-calm moment, nothing strong, just the sense of devastation.
Also in the New York Times, Fabio Bucciarelli made this incredible, like a Renaissance image, of this old man dying in bed, surrounded by his family. I mean, like it was created for a Renaissance painting. There’s only one point of calm now.
Kennerly: I think the first photographs that affected me were actually mass graves. Excavators excavating the floor there, placing bodies in refrigerated trucks, all covered. And you know there are bodies in it, it’s just not a very dramatic photo. The visual doesn’t intersect with the effect of the story.
There have been many very intelligent people who have come out of the protests, of course, because you have symptoms, hobbies and all that. Some other people wear masks and some don’t.
The crisis of covides, monumental, is harder to illustrate. But this can be done, and Joshua Irwandi’s photo of Indonesia for National Geographic is a clever example of a correct coronavirus pandemic photo and deserves to be a Pulitzer candidate. It is the frame of an alleged covid-19 victim, wrapped in plastic in a hospital room, the antithesis of a burning blanket of protest. It’s quiet, lonely and scary. It shows someone who probably died without a family, like thousands of people. It highlights the worst aspect of the pandemic. This is one’s strength. This symbol is a clear reminder that infrequently the most productive representation of a story is far from the action.
Considering all the demanding situations, how can we cope with the difficulties of seeing covid?
Greenspon: If I photographed now, I would pass to Brazil, because I think it is imaginable to get the numbers and the dough, to get this symbol that shows the scale as well as tragedy and suffering. It’s a key word, suffering.
To create an iconic image, you need to identify with the other people you’re photographing. When the center is filtered through the camera, it allows you to see things you couldn’t see otherwise. I have immense sympathy for the other Brazilian people and some of the other countries that would possibly be destroyed. The poor in those countries will have to suffer incredibly. It’s bad enough in this country that poor American citizens will have to suffer. But there’s no hope if you live in Brazil.
I think it would be easier to photograph in Brazil or another developing country because of looser restrictions. It might be more dangerous for a journalist. You’re more likely to get into a ward with a hundred people in it. Maybe catch a priest walking through. It seems to me that there’s a spiritual component to this.
We suffer as a nation. We suffer like a world. We suffer all kinds of prejudices and environmental problems. The word that comes to the brain is agape. This comes from the ancient Greek term for love, but now agape means fear. And that’s what I think of the virus. I’m inspired by what’s happening in the world. I am loving and compassionate for suffering.
This massive isolation. And that’s what I’d be at the center of my mind if I went out to photograph. The feeling of loneliness and this suffering.
What does it mean to have covid? I only know from Chris Cuomo, who did his show when they gave it to him. And Brooke Baldwin. But what does it mean to have the virus if you’re sixty-five and overweight? I’d like to go tell the story of someone at home who was afraid to go to the hospital.
I also have compassion for photographers because they are allowed anywhere. Then you have to create your own story. You have to hang out in poor communities. The zip codes they are now focusing on, the churches where they test would be fertile ground. This has the facet of spirituality, and you have this subject that suffers.
Hodierne: Have you noticed this Washington Post chart? Does it look like it’s night, a map with rays of light coming from other places on a map of the country? Projectors are brighter and larger in spaces where more people have died than others. It’s a great job I can see something like that doing it and cheer it up.
If I were the editor of a local newspaper, I’d rent a kid who had just graduated from art school. I’d say, crazy, give me your ideas.
Greenspon: I thought. There’s a story that hasn’t been told, and I know it because I’ve suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for about 40 years, and I’ve recently been relieved.
These nurses, when they hold a cell phone in the dying patient’s ear, and it is their enjoyed beings who say goodbye, not only traumatizes the family. It’s traumatic this nurse, or this doctor or that nurse auxiliary. And it happens day after day. These other people are going to have genuine disorders in the future.
Looking at the canopy in Vietnam, what photographs can be useful for greedy consultant photographers?
Greenspon: I have a symbol in mind. This is a photo of a Navy sniper falling on the body, in the foreground, of a dead North Vietnamese soldier who just shot. He has an air of horror on his face; he’s about nineteen, but he’s seventeen. It’s Hue, 1968. It’s just the horror of war. It’s the young men who kill.
Burnett: I think of the Symbol of Don McCullin of the Marine in Hue, who was given that look from a thousand meters, simply exhausted by the abusive force of being in struggle for so long.
Hodierne: In June 1969, Life mag published 217 photographs: all young men who died in a week in June. You just moved on. Many of them were the best photos of the school yearbook with their team cups and black-mounted glasses. Some have them in their best school dresses, others in inflexible and formal portraits, placed in front of the flag, which were taken when they finished their fundamental training. All those young, young, young faces, page after page after page, were very powerful.
Kennerly: I don’t think I’ve had a smart fighting photo in Vietnam. On the one hand, if you’re under intense fire, it’s complicated for practical reasons. It’s done. But I won the Pulitzer Prize for images that were just before or just after the action. One of the images that was not in the Pulitzer wallet, but which was taken the same year, in 1971, was a soldier with his blouse and a cross hanging from his neck, a type of device weapon. You can make a very smart picture of a quiet moment. War is 95% boredom and 5% natural terror, from a journalist’s point of view.
I think any smart photographer will be able to take care of 95%.