I’ve got to take a deep breath here.  After showing images related to World Wars I & II in this series, I thought it would be of value to show something related to the War in Vietnam – as an event closer to our immediate memory.  But I had something completely different in mind.  I was thinking about the anti-war movement and a photograph of students sticking flowers in the muzzle of National Guard rifles. Hmm! I found that image pretty quickly but I started to search the credits on it, and this took me into the vividly black and white world of Vietnam War press images.  It was really just before color became dominant, and the black and whites from that war are ever so brilliant, vivid, and starkly gruel.

It all came back like an old nightmare and I realized that the image by Nick Ut showing children fleeing an accidental napalm attack by the South Vietnamese Airforce with little Phan Thị Kim Phúc screaming in terror and pain her clothes burned away defines the Vietnam War.  It is the most significant image of that war.  Indeed, it is, without any doubt, one of the great images of the mid – twentieth century, and it marks a turning point in what is expected from press photographers.  We now expect imbeddness, and we expect reality. And somehow it is amazing that with all this reality that the wars continue.