Up for auction a RARE! "Photo-Journalist" Horst Faas Hand Signed 3.25X5.75 Card.
ES-1784
Horst Faas (28 April 1933 –
10 May 2012) was a German photo-journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
He is best known for his images of the Vietnam War. Born
in Berlin, Germany, Faas began his photographic career in 1951 with the
Keystone Agency, and by the age of 21 he was already covering major events
concerning Indochina, including the peace negotiations in Geneva in 1954.
In 1956 he joined the Associated Press (AP), where he acquired a reputation for
being an unflinching hard-news war photographer, covering the wars in Vietnam and Laos, as
well as in the Congo and Algeria. In 1962, he became AP's chief photographer
for Southeast Asia, and was based in Saigon until 1974. His images of the
Vietnam War won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1965. In
1967 he was severely wounded in the legs by a rocket-propelled grenade.
In 1972, he collected a second Pulitzer, for his coverage
of the conflict in Bangladesh.
Inside Bangladesh, photographer Rashid Talukder considered it too dangerous to publish
his photographs and he released them more than twenty years after Horst's
photographs had appeared. Faas
is also famed for his work as a picture editor, and was instrumental in
ensuring the publication of two of the most famous images of the Vietnam War.[3] On June 18, 1965, during the Vietnam
War with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Battalion on defense duty at Phouc Vinh
airstrip in South Vietnam he took the iconic photo of a soldier wearing a hand
lettered "War Is Hell" slogan on his helmet The notorious "Saigon Execution"
photograph, showing the summary execution of a Viet Cong prisoner by Saigon
police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, taken
by Eddie Adams in
Saigon on February 1, 1968, was sent under his direction. Nick Ut's famous "Napalm Girl" photograph caused a huge controversy over at
the AP bureau; an editor had objected to the photo, saying that the girl
depicted was naked and that nobody would accept it. Faas ordered that Ut's
photo be sent over the wire. In September 1990, freelance photographer Greg Marinovich submitted a series of graphic photos of a
crowd executing a man to the AP bureau in Johannesburg. Once again, AP editors were uncertain if the
photos should be sent over the wire. One editor sent the images to Faas, who
telegrammed back, "send all photos." In
1976, Faas moved to London as AP's senior photo editor for Europe; he retired
in 2004. In retirement he organised reunions of the wartime Saigon press corps
and ran international photojournalism symposiums. He produced four books on his
career and other news photographers, including Requiem, a book
about photographers killed on both sides of the Vietnam War, co-edited with
fellow Vietnam War photojournalist Tim Page.