The Power of Photojournalism: How photographers such as Larry Burrows helped persuade a nation to abandon the Vietnam war
Often called ‘The War at Home’, the Vietnam War was unlike any that had come before. Lasting from 1954 until 1973, for the first time the general public had available to them an uncensored visual descriptor and harrowingly real representation of what occurred during combat overseas. Whereas before media coverage of global conflict was heavily controlled in terms of content and availability, the general public now had access to a constant stream of news that covered both the home and opposing sides. This newly formed connection created a divisive shift in public opinion that was as bitter as it was unexpected. Increasing pressure upon the government led to an eventual withdrawal from Vietnam as disapproval grew, creating a lasting impact on the handling of foreign policy by the State and cementing the voice of the people as a tool for both questioning and change.
It is through this interest and active engagement with reportage of the Vietnam war that we can begin to track and understand the decline of public opinion. Over time, the media effectively became the enemy of the government and had grown enough to reach a massive percentage of Americans. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to filter material that was being made public. Only nine per cent of Americans owned a television during the fifties, but as the war had begun to escalate in both size and violence, more than 93% had a television in their home by the mid sixties. Also by the sixties, newspapers reached on average 60 million households per week, encompassing a massive audience. It is this explosion of available information and the way this went on to shape public opinion that made the effect of photojournalism in this case so significant, and so unique.
What makes this topic so interesting is that the power of the still image was enough to ultimately undermine the efforts of the United States, despite their attempt to produce pro war propaganda and encourage support for their involvement in Vietnam. Initial awareness of the conflict and America’s involvement within it was quite low. Almost two thirds of people said they paid ‘little or no attention to the developments in Vietnam’. The initial justification for invasion, the ‘Domino Theory’ as coined by Eisenhower in the mid-fifties, purported that communism would spread throughout Asia, beginning with the fall of Vietnam. Efforts to support this claim spanned everything from religious tactics with posters threatening the destruction of Catholicism in exchange for Communism in the North, to dropping flyer bombs on enemy soldiers offering safe passage in return for defection.
Even back in the United States, the government were trying to encourage support from a growingly dissenting public. A variety of pro war propaganda was filtered down into the public eye over the years, the most famous of which is considered to be ‘The Green Berets’, starring American patriot John Wayne. It was designed to paint United States involvement in Vietnam as righteous and just. Unfortunately, due to both its timing and tone, this film served only to fuel the fire of protest that was already rising- it was at this point during the timeline of the war that opinion had begun to significantly shift, as more and more news of atrocities committed overseas made their way back. Earlier that year, details of the My Lai massacre, in which between three and five hundred Vietnamese civilians were brutally murdered en-masse by American soldiers had become public. The release of this film only several months later only added to the outrage, depicting the government as cruel, ignorant and untrustworthy. A review by the New York Times upon the year of its release described it as ‘’unspeakable … stupid … rotten … false in every detail … It is vile and insane’’, a critical reception that was indeed matched by the general public. This event was a turning point for the American people and created a hole in the barrier, through which more and more reportage of the war was able to pour through. It is examples such as this that demonstrate the futility of attempting to turn the tide of public opinion, when so much of the population had access to real and uncensored material. It shows the beginning of the divide between people and state, and a choice to no longer believe in the lie but instead to question foreign policy, and to seek out real representation of the conflict abroad. (Fig.1 Below, The Green Berets Film Jacket)
Described as having ‘seems to have altered… the normal relationship between elites and masses’, the Vietnam War is a defining example of the way everyday people not only became engaged with foreign policy but actively sought to challenge it. The extent of protest movements and their reach throughout the duration of the war are well documented, and demonstrate the shift and development of attitudes towards the war as it progressed. We can use this timeline of events to map out these feelings and the way they coincide with landmark events of the war.
This overall shift, which happened over the course of more than a decade, can be split into four general stages of escalation. The first stage, ‘Innocence’, also known as ‘Rally round the flag’, describes the initial public response to the beginning of the United States involvement in the war. It it best surmised as ‘the sudden and substantial increase in public approval of the President that occurs in certain kinds of dramatic international events involving the United States’. The effect of this syndrome is a reduction in the criticism of governmental policies, which is clearly demonstrated by the fact that this period, during the fifties and early sixties, had the lowest level of awareness towards the war, but the highest level of approval.
After Lyndon B Johnson came into his presidency, and the public were distracted by the election and a promise in a change of policy, opinion entered into the ‘Permissive Majority’ phase. The general public were willing to give the new policies time and a chance to work, after an increase in carpet bombings and military attacks in 1964 seemed to offer an end to the war. During this time, Gallup polls still showed a relatively high approval rating of over sixty percent. This grace period awarded by the public was unfortunately met instead by a massive influx of troops to Vietnam, from 75,000 to 125,000 and a doubling in the number of monthly draft calls. This action was immediately condemned by the majority of communist leaders on the global stage, but internal support from Congress and US governors gave the US military the platform they required to fully engage with the conflict in Vietnam. This is often considered to be the tipping point of America’s involvement with the war. (Fig. 2 Below, Thích Quảng Đức burns himself alive in protest in Saigon)
It is at this point, where we reach the third stage of ‘Escalation’, that we can begin to see a real downturn in public opinion. As mentioned earlier, it is around this time that televisions were becoming an everyday phenomenon, present in more than ninety percent of all American households. Fifty eight percent of this number reported only getting their news in this way. As the number of troops on the ground increased, and conditions worsened, genuine and unbiased information was becoming available to the average everyday citizen. Protests increased in number, size and intensity. Protesters burned their draft cards, veterans marched upon the White House to return their medals, and teach ins were conducted across hundreds of universities. Buddhists set themselves alight in defiance of the regime in Saigon, and public figures such as Martin Luther King came forward to express their opposition to the government’s involvement in the war. At the time of his speech at Riverside in 1967, for the first instance approval ratings towards the war dropped to under fifty percent, where it would remain- permanently. For the first time, efforts to persuade the nation of a just cause for war were failing.
This inevitable downswing was both reflected and fueled by the mainstream media. With articles such as ‘The War No one wants- or can end’ (Newsweek 1959), ‘What it will take to win in Vietnam’ (US News & world Report 1965), and ‘End this horror- Nam call as kids bombed’ (The sun, 1972) becoming commonplace and spanning almost ten years of conflict, it is clear that feelings of dissent towards the war were consistently widespread. Reaching millions of people every day, the media dominated domestic opinion and pushed through into the final phase- ‘Withdrawal’. With the war at its pinnacle, millions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, America found itself ‘…mired in stalemate’. As it stretched out into the late sixties, feelings of disgust and shock grew as coverage of one horror after another made its way back home. Attempts at peace talks stagnated. Violence escalated back in the United States as more and more people pushed for action. Several students were killed during peaceful protests, millions more marched and wilting under the pressure of investigations into war crimes, it was Nixon that eventually bowed to public pressure and negotiated a peace settlement that allowed America to withdraw.
It is within this timeline of events that we can begin to determine the role that photojournalism had to play, how it influenced the public and why it had such a profound impact on the American people.
As touched upon in the beginning, the Vietnam war earned itself the title of ‘The War at Home’, due to the extensive involvement of the public in foreign affairs. The rise in mainstream media increased public awareness and made foreign policy an accessible subject for the working man. The Vietnam war is a unique case in this sense as it created the opportunity for people to educate themselves, and therefore gave them the ability to question and challenge a government that beforehand would have been able to proceed unchallenged. It was the unstoppable nature and exponential growth of television and news that created the platform for photojournalism to develop and thrive. For the citizens of America, this was a new kind of reportage- raw, unconventional, investigative. It granted an unfiltered view of the consequences of war, the effects of which ‘may have been sufficiently traumatic enough to produce a more permanent change in mass foreign policy attitudes’. It was a floodgate that, once opened, could not be stopped or ignored, something that the state was utterly unprepared for and could ultimately do nothing about.
With the tide came a host of photojournalists, amateur and professional alike, as demand for coverage was so high that anyone able to acquire a camera and a press pass could travel to Vietnam and attempt their own brand of reportage. This is not to say however that all of these images made it home, but this new era of photography gave us some of the most iconic images in history. The likes of Nick Ut, Don McCullin and of course, Larry Burrows not only contributed to photographic history but produced some of the most significant and influential pictures during the period of the Vietnam War.
One of the most iconic images belongs to Nick Ut, and was taken in 1972 as tensions between the state and the people were at their most tenuous. It shows a young Vietnamese girl fleeing her village near Saigon, naked and terrified as her body burns from the napalm that the American military had dropped upon her home. This picture won Ut the Pulitzer Prize, which is awarded for journalism, for the profound impact this picture had on both the war and the American people, demonstrating the power and potential photojournalism had to offer. It exposed the darker side of warfare; the collateral damage that no one was willing to speak about; the pain and suffering of innocent people caught in the crossfires of two faceless opponents that did not consider them worth protecting. It projected an image of the US government as ruthless and war hungry, a stain which never lifted and remained within the American conscience, even after the war was ended a year later. (Fig. 3 Below, ‘Napalm Girl’, 1972)
The impact of seeing children affected by war is still very much the same, as demonstrated by the effect that Nilüfer Demir’s image of the drowned Syrian boy had on the world. ‘What I saw has left a terrible impression that keeps me awake at night’ she states during an interview on taking the famous photograph. ‘Then again, I am happy that the word finally cares and is mourning the dead children. I hope that my picture can contribute to changing the way we look at immigration in Europe’.
Don McCullin was another photojournalist working in Vietnam at the same time as Ut. Perhaps his most famous image is of a shell-shocked marine, clutching his rifle as he stares blankly into space above the camera, completely dissociated from the world around him. When speaking on the subject of war, he echoes Demir’s sentiments; ‘As for war, it is in your face. You cannot see a dead person and walk around it as if it were not there. It’s there. It revolts you.” It was this revulsion towards the treatment of both civilians and soldiers that drove the general public to challenge their government, and to so extensively protest their involvement in a war they didn’t want.
Responsible for pushing the boundaries of his field and creating some of the most moving and iconic sets of photographs from the Vietnam war was Larry Burrows, a photographer for Life Magazine. Burrows spent almost a decade photographing the conflict until he was killed in Laos, when his helicopter was shot down. Described as having a ‘compassionate vision’, his work was set apart by his use of colour film to record the events of the war. Through his lens, he painted a picture of the war that was unlike anything that had been previously seen. ‘One Ride With Yankee Papa 13’, although shot in black and white, was an important building block for his future photographing Vietnam. A fourteen-page photographic essay, it documented the day to day of American soldiers on the ground, and the conditions they were forced to live with. His later work, such as ‘Reaching Out’, fed on from this, and the compassion he felt for the men who were living, dying and suffering alongside him.
‘Reaching Out’, taken in 1966, revealed in full colour the horror and brutality that working as a soldier in Vietnam entailed. There is no shying away from the reality of this image- we can only watch as the wounded marine reaches for his stricken comrade, the blood stains on his bandages a gruesome splash of red amongst the mud and the green wreckage of their camp. It captures the chaos of the moment, torturously still as we witness the most basic human need for connection and compassion- the need to feel safe. (Fig. 4 Below, ‘Reaching Out, 1966)
The presence of this kind of compassion is evident in all of Burrows work. He brought to the American public the lives, and indeed the deaths, of US and Vietnamese citizens alike. He brought them their pain, sorrow, confusion and loss. He brought to them widows crying as they clutched their dead husbands, villages that had been set alight by soldiers, blood and bullets and bodies too great to count. He appealed to the humanity of a nation, and presented them with a truth they could not ignore. ‘The war pierced the myth of American invincibility’, leaving behind a country that could no longer plead innocence, nor ignorance. The entire dynamic of the relationship between the people and the state had been permanently altered, and they would no longer blindly follow, but instead, question. At every turn the government was met with opposition by those who had seen and accepted the reality of the war, and would no longer be persuaded by manipulated facts or half-truths. It is safe to say that whilst photojournalism may not have been the sole reason for the dissolution of the war, it was an essential phenomenon that opened up the world to the people at home, and has left a truly lasting impression on their people.