Death of prize-winning combat photographer Horst Faas, 79, whose dramatic images of suffering in the Vietnam war were seen worldwide
Horst Faas, a prize-winning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world’s legendary photojournalists, has died at 79.
A native of Germany who joined the US-based news co-operative The Associated Press in 1956, Mr Faas photographed wars, revolutions, the Olympic Games and other major events.
But he was best known for covering Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in 1967 and won four major photo awards including the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes.
As chief of AP’s photo operations in Saigon for a decade beginning in 1962, Mr Faas covered the fighting while recruiting and training new talent from among foreign and Vietnamese freelancers.
The result was “Horst’s army” of young photographers, who fanned out with Faas-supplied cameras and film and stern orders to “come back with good pictures”.
Mr Faas and his editors chose the best and put together a steady flow of telling photos – South Vietnam’s soldiers fighting and its civilians struggling to survive.
Burly but agile, Mr Faas spent much time in the field and on December 6, 1967, was wounded in the legs by a rocket-propelled grenade at Bu Dop, in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
He might have bled to death but a young US Army medic managed to stem the flow.
He often teamed with Pulitzer Prize-winning AP reporter Peter Arnett to produce powerful and exclusive reports such as the 1969 story of Company A, an army unit that balked at orders to move against the enemy.
Mr Faas was a brilliant planner, able to score journalistic scoops by anticipating “not just what happens next but what happens after that”, as one colleague put it.
His reputation as a demanding taskmaster and perfectionist belied a humanistic streak he was loath to admit, while helping less fortunate ex-colleagues and other causes.
He was widely read on Asian history and culture, and assembled an impressive collection of Chinese Ming porcelain, bronzes and other treasures.
In later years Mr Faas turned his training skills into a series of international photojournalism symposiums.
Mr Faas also helped to organise reunions of the wartime Saigon press corps, and was attending a combination of those events when he became ill in Hanoi on May 4 2005.
He was hospitalised first in Bangkok and then in Germany, where doctors traced his permanent paralysis from the waist down to a spinal haemorrhage caused by blood-thinning heart medication.
Although requiring a wheelchair, he continued to travel to photo exhibits and other professional events, mainly in Europe. His health deteriorated in late 2008. Hospitalised in February for treatment of skin problems, he also underwent gastric surgery.
Born in Berlin on April 28, 1933, Mr Faas grew up during World War II and like all young German boys was required to join the Hitler Youth organisation.
Years later, he wrote that Allied air raids and “the fascinating spectacle of anti-aircraft action in the sky” were part of daily life, as was being required “to stand at attention in school and listen to an announcement that the father or older brother of a classmate had died for fuhrer and Fatherland”.
Mr Faas left Saigon in 1970 to become AP’s roving photographer for Asia, based in Singapore, ranging widely on assignments.
He teamed with New Zealander Arnett on a cross-country reporting tour of the US as seen by foreigners, and covered the 1972 Munich Olympics where he photographed a ski-masked Palestinian terrorist on the balcony of the building where Israeli athletes were being held hostage, hours before they were murdered at the airport.
The same year, he won a second Pulitzer Prize, along with Michel Laurent, for gripping pictures of torture and executions in Bangladesh.
In 1976, he relocated to London as AP’s senior photo editor for Europe, until he retired from the news agency in 2004.