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If You Don't Know The Name Horst Faas, Look At This

By: Greg Myre // May 11, 2012
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Of all the memorable photographs that came out of the Vietnam War, Horst Faas was probably responsible for more of them than any other photographer.

Faas, who died in Munich on Thursday at age 79, spent eight years in Vietnam for The Associated Press. He was willing to go anywhere no matter what the risks, and he was relentless in his pursuit of images that captured the war.

He won a Pulitzer Prize. He was badly injured. And he was a stern taskmaster who helped mentor countless photographers, both Vietnamese and Westerners.

He assembled some of the best photography from Vietnam in Requiem, a 1997 book about photographers killed on both sides of the conflict.

Having survived all those years as a combat photographer, Faas returned to Vietnam in 2005 for a reunion of the press corps 30 years after the war's end. He fell ill there, the result of a spinal hemorrhage that left him paralyzed from the waist down for the final years of his life.

Just dwell on this image for a minute or two, and you get a sense of the power of Faas' photos:

There's much, much more where this came from, in the full obituary.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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