Research On Eddie Adams

Eddie Adams:

The reason I choose this photographer was because he took lots of controversial images of the Vietnamese war. He has both photos of American soldiers, Vietnamese soldiers and images of Vietnamese people in his images as well which makes his photographs fairly unique.He also captures some very gruesome images of what happened to some people during this war.

Eddie Adams worked for Associated Press in the  Vietnam War when he took his best-known photograph. General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shot a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyễn Văn Lém, on a Saigon street, on February 1, 1968. The reason I like this image is because it shows one of the things that was viewed as acceptable during this time and also shows how terrible the war actually was.

In this photo we see Eddie Adams  photos of other combat photographers preparing to go out on a mission with the platoon they were attached to.

Here we see that Eddie Adams has taken a photo of  a bound Vietnamese soldier who looks like he is about to be taken to an American outpost to be interrogated by the USA army.

This image is rather interesting because I have seen the description of this photo form both a Vietnamese perspective and a westerner perspective and they are both very different. The Vietnamese perspective is it is an image of an American death squad entering a village to kill the inhabitants. Where as the westerner perspective is it is American solders saving a village from a Vietnamese raid.

In this image we see that Eddie Adams has managed to capture an image of a drill sergeant shouting at a
soldier about something. This was done to break a soldiers civilian mind set. 

One of the brilliant things about all of Eddie Adams is they are all an excellent example of tone. All of the image where taken in black and white which means they have lost all of their colour information. Either way I think that this makes the images stand out to the audience. This is because by getting rid of the colour of the image it allows the viewer to fill in the blanks in their mind which makes the image rather interesting because it becomes a sort of game. Filling in the image is rather easy because Eddie is very good at capturing emotion which means it makes it rather easy for people to find out what would have been happening when the photo was taken. 

This photographer has influenced me to try and get photos in black and white, this is because in Eddie Adams work he uses the absents of colour to show the emotion of the people within the images. The reason this is a good technique is because without the distraction of colour people can focus more on the facial expressions of the people involved in the photo and can see more easily how they react to their surrounds. It also makes it easier to take a photo because light is less of a need for this type of photography because it is black and white and sort of auto does it which means if you see a good emotional image you can quickly take it.

In summary this photographer is very good at capturing peoples emotion and what peoples after emotion would be. This is known because the emotion captured is so strong you can tell what their emotion dirrecly after it would be. This is a rather impressive technique that he does very well with all his work and would be a hard thing to try and repeat.