Larry Burrows

      In 1997 Horst Faas and Tim Page published Requiem, a homage to the 135 photographers who died while covering the wars in Indochina and Vietnam. The work of Larry Burrows, who photographed the war in Vietnam from 1962 until he died in a helicopter shot down on the border with Laos in 1971, was central to that undertaking. Vietnam, a more extensive selection of his work, enables us to see his achievement more extensively and to define it more clearly.

      Burrows was born in London in 1926. He left school at sixteen and got a job in Life magazine’s London bureau, where he printed thousands of pictures by Robert Capa and others. It would be hard to exaggerate the effect of this apprenticeship on his subsequent career. Capa practically invented the genre of combat photography and defined the standards by which it would be judged. If your pictures aren’t good enough, he was fond of saying, that’s because you’re not close enough. Burrows took Capa at his word. In Vietnam a colleague decided that Burrows was either the bravest man in the world or the most short-sighted. Tales of that myopic bravery are legion, and Burrows himself thought ‘the best thing that happens … is when someone turns around and says, “Well, you’ve taken your chances with the rest of us.”’ Like other photographers in Vietnam Burrows fell into the habit of edging right up to death, but whereas Page and Sean Flynn (son of Errol) were swash-buckling, wild, stoned, Burrows was distinguished by his patience and meticulous calm. It is possible to detect these qualities in the formal elegance of the work. While Capa said he would ‘rather have a strong image that is technically bad than vice-versa’, Burrows was obsessed with making strong, technically perfect images. Looking at his best photos reminds me of some documentary footage I once saw of men coming suddenly under fire in Bosnia. Everyone hit the dirt. It took a while to take in what was so strange and unnerving about this footage. Then I realised that the camera recording it all had remained absolutely steady.

      This unflinching quality is seen to dramatic effect in a black-and-white photo-essay published in Life in April 1963. Burrows was photographing a Marine helicopter squadron, focusing on James Farley, a fresh-faced twenty-one-year-old gunner. In the course of what was expected to be a routine mission the squad comes under heavy fire. One of the helicopters goes down and Farley’s chopper lands nearby, attempting to rescue the crew. By the time they are airborne again two badly wounded men are sprawled on the floor of the helicopter. One of them dies. The resulting photos have all the cramped panic and horror of Snowdon’s death in Catch-22. But what makes them into a perfect story is the shot of Farley back at base, sobbing, aged by more than a decade in the course of a dozen photographs.

      That was the luxury of working for Life: an absence of deadlines and the freedom to construct a narrative around photographs rather than taking them to illustrate breaking news. Burrows used these freedoms to similar effect in the colour sequence on Operation Prairie (1966), which culminates in the famous image of the wounded black sergeant apparently reaching towards his white comrade, also wounded. On the one hand it’s an unadulterated image of the chaos, mud and blood of the aftermath of combat. But it is also a classic Life-like image in that it is, simultaneously, a statement of fact (this really happened) and, precisely by virtue of the unimpeachable quality of its evidence, an illustration of a larger truth (in this case the equality of suffering and tenderness between races) which might not be true at all. What we have, in other words, is a vivid example of the camera’s unique capability: not the creation of a myth but its depiction.

It would be a mistake, therefore, to see images like this as proof of the photographer’s anti-war stance. At that time, in fact, Burrows was still, in his own words, ‘rather a hawk’. It was only later, in 1969, that he attained A Degree of Disillusion. That was the title of another photo-essay, belatedly focusing on the impact of the war on the Vietnamese, as Philip Jones Griffiths had done throughout his time there. By then Burrows said the faces all over Vietnam were ‘more tired’ and ‘dazed’ than he had ever known. In Roger Mattingly’s well-known 1971 portrait that fatigue can be seen in Burrows’ own face. He looks exactly like one of the combat-numbed grunts he had so often pictured: a sign of how the gap between photographer and his subjects was shrinking, lethally. This is suggested still more powerfully by Henri Huet’s picture in Requiem of Burrows helping to carry a wounded soldier, whipped back by a chopper’s downdraught. Burrows’ thick-framed spectacles make him instantly recognisable, which is slightly odd given that the photo is so like one by him, thereby forcing the viewer to concede that a Burrows image is not as instantly recognisable as is often claimed. Indeed, to this observer, Huet’s images and Burrows’ are often almost interchangeable. Since the two photographers died together on that helicopter flight on the Laos border this is not inappropriate. But the images in the pages of Vietnam also have much in common with those in Page’s Nam (1983). Page was spectacularly high on the ‘glamour’ of war; according to his epitaph in Life, on the other hand, when Burrows looked at war ‘what he saw was people’. Except, it turns out, his coverage of ‘The Air War’ shows Burrows to be just as intoxicated by the psychedelic technology of American fire-power as Page was. Two almost identically framed shots, taken at the same moment, in 1969, in Cholon – one in colour by Burrows, the other in black-and-white by Griffiths – of a blood-drenched woman with a soldier kneeling over her, staring nine hundred yards into the distance, crop up in both Vietnam and Vietnam Inc. (the Welshman’s camera can be seen in the bottom right-hand corner of Burrows’ picture).*

      This is not to diminish Burrows’ individual talent or achievement. It is simply to recognise the accuracy of Sontag’s judgement from the ’70s, namely that ‘the very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer’s work from another, except insofar as he or she has monopolised a particular subject’ – and in Vietnam they were all shooting the same subject. Similarly, Burrows has always been praised for his humanity and compassion when, if you think about it, what would really set a photographer apart would be the ability to photograph injury, suffering and death with a lack of compassion, even, possibly, with a touch of glee. No, Burrows is a great photographer less because of what distinguishes him as an artist than because of what he has in common with his colleagues and subjects. And I think that those trademark spectacles of his enable us to view his legend (in the cartographic sense) more clearly.

      It’s a classic sixth-form debate: whether to take photographs of the injured or to try to help them. Burrows repeatedly took photographs of wounded men being helped by their comrades, even when they were themselves wounded. He was drawn to such scenes because they dramatised