|
|
“A South Vietnamese Guard Threatens a Captured Vietcong,” Mekong Delta, 1962, photo by Larry Burrows. (top)
A detail from “Ph Tasuos, Cambodia, 1970, by Burrows shows a soldier suffering from heat fatigue drinking from a canteen given to him by a wounded fellow infantryman. |
|
|
“Khe Sanh, Vietnam, April 1968, by Larry Burrows shows a young soldier clutching a stray dog for comfort. |
|
Vietnam War etched in timeless photos by Burrows
Gerry Desautels
BANNER CORRESPONDENT
Russell Burrows was just 22 when his British father Larry was killed in Vietnam. A celebrated photographer for Life magazine, Larry Burrows had already spent the last decade chronicling the conflict while his family lived nearby in Hong Kong. But the father of two’s luck was about to run out, when in February 1971, he took off on a “routine” assignment by helicopter to cover the South Vietnamese army’s invasion of Laos. His distinguished photography career was mercilessly ended by North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Burrows was dead, but at the early age of 44, his name had already become synonymous with the Vietnam War.
The timeless — and timely — vintage work of Larry Burrows will be featured in a show opening this Friday at the Larry Collins Fine Art Gallery in Provincetown, with a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. at 145 Commercial St. in the West End. (Some seven to eight prints will be mounted with others available for viewing in Collins’ archive collection.)
“What’s interesting about many of these photos is that they were taken early on when Kennedy was president, around 1962, before the Americans became militarily involved in the war,” according to Larry Collins, the show’s curator and himself a Vietnam veteran. “We had advisors there but we hadn’t committed troops yet. So Burrows was already presenting this to the world in Life, and the kind of stuff that was happening; but apparently we did not heed his message.”
The highly collectible color works printed after Burrows’ death are both touching and haunting, juxtaposed against the backdrop of war, and fear and doubt in the eyes of young soldiers the same age of Burrows’ own son at the time. His images are most often compassionately focused on the common soldier (from both sides of the political divide) and helpless civilians tragically overwhelmed by the violence and literally caught in the crossfire.
From Burrows’ lens, we catch glimpses into the human side of combat: a pensive soldier clutching a stray pet dog for comfort; an exhausted combatant on a muddy hillside grasping for a drink of water as if it were a baby’s bottle; a frightened and interrogated Vietnamese boy rope bound to another Vietcong as a dagger held by the enemy looms overhead; and two wounded Americans being carried out of a high grass battle area, shell shocked and weary, one of the wounded virtually striking the pose of Jesus in Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture.
“I always felt informed by my father’s pictures and aware of his approach and method to photojournalism,” relates Russell Burrows by phone from Martha’s Vineyard. “I always felt a step ahead of the news that was being presented to the public at the time. Because of his slow approach and photographic method, and the luxury of time [on a longer magazine print deadline] and thought that went behind his pictures, it allowed them to transcend to what they represented at the time and became almost iconic in nature.”
Today Russell Burrows works in the publishing field and helped to create his father’s posthumous coffee table-sized book “Larry Burrows, Vietnam” just released last year. “I’ve always plied to photography and photographers,” confesses the younger Burrows.
“Because as a family we had control over my father’s photography, I always wanted to get it right. What is really familiar work to me became history for others. Many of his Vietnam pictures are now regarded as art.”
Burrows mastery was indisputable—to the point that the military allowed him access and vantage points to the war denied to other eager photographers trying to emulate the seasoned Brit. “What’s different about Burrows’ photography is that he focuses on the individual and their suffering, particularly the Vietnamese,” Collins says. “He doesn’t romanticize them as brave soldiers but as frightened boys, basically. He does it over and over and over again.”
Perhaps Burrows drew inspiration from his own life, which transcended the art world and a typical English schooling path. Instead of attending university, he chose to begin work at age 16 (with a massive stutter) in the photography lab of London’s Life bureau. It was through Life that he eventually met his Chinese wife.
And although Burrows fully intended to serve as a British Army or Navy photographer, his eyesight was so poor that the military rejected him.
Still, Burrows, was drawn to participating in the war for its dichotomous balance of humanity set against an intrinsic parallel to violence, torture and cruelty. He also understood the deep perils and risks involved. From the very beginning, Burrows work stood out in Vietnam. His work came at a significant turning point, when the advent of network television began to eclipse black-and-white and color photography as the favored mode of communication, and the invasion of “mass media” outlets. By default and universal recognition, Burrows became the signature photographer of the Vietnam War, covering it for nine years, longer than any other photographer or print journalist.
Burrows’ uncanny ability to tell a story in print best helped him to prevail in the public eye as outstanding and timely, most often with the use of shocking and stirring color. According to Burrows’ close wartime comrade and author David Halberstam, “Color, done right, was mood; mood, done right, became art.”
According to Halberstam, Burrows “… worried about the morality of what he was doing, photographing young men in their moment of greatest anguish….” But his enormous skill and aptitude for capturing the essence of the war outweighed the worry; his desire to photograph the lushness of Vietnam during post-war peacetime was not to be. The beauty of the country would have to wait, as Burrows’ death upstaged his own being as one of the world’s consummate visual historians and photojournalists of the 21st century.
“Larry Burrows, War Photographs” is on view at Larry Collins Fine Art August 6–18. Gallery hours are 11 a.m.–10 p.m. daily, located at 145 Commercial St., Provincetown. For more information, call (508) 487-6600.
|
In the Arts
|
|
|
|
|
Aug 5th, 2004