Requiem - By the Photographers who died in Vietnam and IndoChina

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The wars in French IndoChina and Vietnam, from the mid 1950's until 1975, claimed many lives. Of the photographers who covered them 135 are believed to have been killed or missing. The book Requiem - By the Photographers who died in Vietnam and IndoChina acts as a memorial to these photographers by showing the photographs they took of these conflicts.

The book is edited by two photographers, Horst Faas and Tim Page, who worked in Vietnam and who were also wounded during the conflict. The dedication in the book states that:

This book is dedicated to the 135 photographers of different nations who are known to have died or to have disappeared while covering the wars in IndoChina, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Their lives are remembered through their work here assembled. (Backcover of book)

The photographers killed and whose photographs appear in the book include:

• Robert Capa
  Founder, together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour, of the Magnum photographic agency in 1947. Robert Capa was killed in IndoChina in 1954 when he stepped on a landmine. The book shows the last frames of film that he took.
   

  [Capa] was covering his fifth war when he set out with French troops to photograph a story in the Red River delta near Hanoi. He spent the day in late May photographing rice paddies surrounded by tanks. Routine. There was a false step. Only the legend remains. (p. 156)

• Henri Huet
  He was born in Vietnam to a French father and a Vietnamese mother. Heut was killed in 1971 when the helicopter he was travelling in was shot down over Laos by enemy forces.
   

  [Huet] learned photography in the French army and spent the rest of his life using it to tell Vietnam's story ... His Leica M2s and Nikon Fs recorded not just the solider's ordeal but his humanity. (pp. 269-270)

• Larry Burrows
  British photographer who worked for Life magazine. He was killed in 1971 while travelling in the same helicopter as Henri Huet.
   

  [Burrows] photographed 50 combat missions to get what he wanted for Life magazine's first major cover story about the Vietnam war. On January 25 1963, the then most powerful magazine in America ran Burrow's pictures of dead and captured Viet Cong guerrillas in a 14 page spread that set the standard for all war reportage to follow ... Working out of a hotel room with two double beds - one for the masses of camera gear he was constantly cleaning and rebuilding - [he] spent most of his time in the field, alone, seeking out the action ... He carried extra film rolls in his socks. (pp. 92-96)

Related Material

1. Henri Huet - I was a war photographer in Vietnam by Horst Faas and Hélène Gédouin. A book published in 2006 in French. Available from Amazon (UK). Hélène Gédouin is the niece of Henri Huet’s brother.
2. Horst Faas Update by Steve Stibbens Digital Journalist (March 2006)
3. Horst Faas in Murnau by Marianne Fulton Digital Journalist (October 2005)
4. The Saigon Execution by Horst Faas Digital Journalist (October 2004)
5. Remembering Larry Burrows by Horst Faas Digital Journalist (February 2003)
6. Horst Faas Obituary The Guardian (May 2012)
7. In Vietnam, Turning a Camera on the War The New York Times (March 2018)
8. Tim Page Obituary The Guardian (September 2022)
9. Tim Page, the photographer who lived on borrowed time by Dominic Faulder, Nikkei Asia associate editor (September 2022)