Between Inertia and Amnesia: Making and Archiving War Images in Vietnam

War from another vantage point 

For decades we have seen the American war in Vietnam from American eyes. For decades, images of the war captured by western photojournalists have dominated the internet and popular culture. Some of the most famous images that emerged from the American war in Vietnam—including “Self-Immolation of Thich Quang Duc'' by Malcolm Browne (1963), “Execution of Nguyen Van Lem” by Eddie Adams (1968), “Napalm girl” by Nick Ut (1972), or “U.S. Evacuation, Saigon 1975” by Hubert van Es (1975)—were captured from the other side. A subject of historical and public interest, the war found its countless interpretations in western films, literature, and music. From Rambo, Platoon to Apocalypse Now, the one among the many wars in Vietnam as we know it was reduced to ‘the Vietnam war’ in international references. The realization that my understanding of the war is not aligned with the majority of others outside of Vietnam led me to evaluate the asymmetrical cultural representations of its memory. From an anti-imperialism perspective, Vietnam is widely considered the victor in this war, disenthralled from its colonial and imperial subjugation, yet American perspectives of the war have the upper hand over our knowledge, understanding, and in the end memories of it. Spivak described this dominance as a form of epistemic violence, whereby “subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism” is seen as “subjugated knowledge” or “naive knowledge” that ranks low on the hierarchy, that is disqualified or inadequate to the required level of (western) scientificity [1]. And for this reason, it feels imperative to look from other vantage points. 

The war in Vietnam was the first war to be televised on an international scale [2], brought directly to an audience who had never seen a war so up-close, as Susan Sontag  wrote in “Looking at War”[3],“ the understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.” This impact was catalytic, as it mobilized strong antiwar movements abroad. At the same time, it marked the beginning of the age of empathy fatigue, as Sontag foresaw how we would become desensitized and inured to images of violence and suffering. Critiques of photographs by western photojournalists of the war in Vietnam have dismantled the “western cult of [journalistic] objectivity” [4] when it comes to depicting war(s) in a land distant in time and space, suggesting how they paradoxically contributed to the capitalistic visual litany of hostilities and bloodshed, based on the liberal idea about how these images deliver truthful observations of the war. This was in contrast to the case of images made by its adversary. While images by photojournalists working for the Vietnamese liberation army were sparsely seen outside of Vietnam, except for perhaps in a few allied countries in the Communist Bloc, their disproportionate unpopularity has long been attributed  to their political association with the communist  party, which makes them dismissable as propaganda. Their impact was restricted, localized, their non-objectivity hardly a matter of dispute. Over the past two decades or so, however, there have been emergent interests in excavating divergent perspectives and cultural representations of the war to question such prevalent presupposition and pave the way for growing studies in the Vietnamese perspectives to explore how the war was for the many Vietnamese who lived through it, both in Vietnam and in the diaspora: our tokens of memories, our insistence on building canonized signifiers, memorials and effigies, museums and war collectibles, and especially the Vietnamese war photographs [5].

In contemporary Vietnam, images of the war, as seen in museums, textbooks, exhibitions and mainstream media, seek to romanticize the national victories over colonialism and imperialism. From Hanoi, Quang Tri to Ho Chi Minh City, remnants of American aircrafts and images of POWs are displayed on busy streets and public space as trophies rather than war artifacts. The history of the war was, indeed, written by the Vietnamese Communist Party. Though not the longest war and occupation in the protracted and complex history of Vietnam, the American war marked the ending of the Vietnamese struggles over centuries of colonization and imperialism, and as such it was monumentalized in the collective memory of the nascent nation in the making. But in both Vietnam and elsewhere, the photographs taken by the Vietnamese liberation photojournalists, so often reduced to naive propaganda, have also been historically removed from its individual makers. 

Who gets to speak, who gets to challenge, when counter-memory is an announced public offense to both the collective and the predominant, globalized historical memories of the war? Within the limited scope of this essay, I attempt to complicate the role of the war images taken by Vietnamese liberation photojournalists, during and in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. I argue that the act of photographing was ultimately radical, as the war images played a compartmental role in wartime communication, popular mobilization for the revolutionary cause, as well as in defining the young nationalist identity through counter-imperial narratives, the consciousness  of which continue to transfix memories of the war in Vietnam up until today. Through secondary research and in-depth interviews with some of those with firsthand knowledge and access into the visual documentation of the war, particularly photographers and archivists working for the Vietnam News Agency, I delve into the process of making these images, how they were strategically weaponized and utilized by the liberation force to deliver the political messages, their functions as well as their limitations. This essay also looks into the state of archiving analogue war images today in Vietnam, the present-day functions of these images and how they are adapted and repurposed to serve the contemporary agenda. 

Photojournalism in an ideological battlefield 

Photography was brought into Indochina during colonization by the French as early as 1826 [6] initially as a tool to document lives in the colony. In the 1860s, photography was slowly adopted by native Vietnamese via commercial photo salons that produced individual and family portraits, but they were largely considered a bourgeois activity accessible only to an elite few. The political potential of photography did later emerge in the early days of the first Indochina war, as photojournalism entered public discourse as a form of visual documentation of historical events significant to the Vietnamese resistance. In 1953, as Vietnam was on the brink of the American war, Ho Chi Minh approved the decision to set up the Vietnamese Enterprise of Cinema and Photography [7], which laid the groundwork for the inclusion of photography and films in the Communist Party’s revolutionary mission. 

The majority of Vietnamese photojournalists who were active during the war against the U.S. were part of the Vietnam News Agency (VNA). There were a few other Party-affiliated newspapers at the time, such as Quân Đội Nhân Dân [People’s Army Newspaper], or Nhân Dân [The People], but VNA predominated both nation-wide and international circulation. Founded by Ho Chi Minh who named the agency Việt Nam Thông Tấn xã [Vietnam News Agency], VNA marked its foundational date on September 15, 1945, the same day it broadcasted the full version of Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence in three languages, Vietnamese, English and French, which was then a strategic decision to enter the public sphere as an integral mouthpiece for the resistance’s newly-founded governing body. VNA’s early missions were not just about collecting signals from international wire agencies such as TASS, Xinhua or AFP, but also to be the intelligence midpoint that transmitted and communicated information to administrative bases across Vietnam [khu kháng chiến][8]. During the resistance war against the U.S., VNA worked in close collaboration with Thông Tấn xã Giải Phóng [Liberation News Agency or LNA] [9], the official news organization run by the South Vietnam National Liberation Front [10], to disseminate information and exchange intelligence, including images captured by their photographers—though photo transmission only happened much later, and only quite primitively, at the heights of the war in the early 1970s [11] when the two agencies started to adopt teletyping and telephoto techniques [12]. Despite the scanty conditions and constant technical and material restrictions of those years, revolutionary photojournalism became indispensable to the news service, as a way to reclaim the tool from their oppressors by visualizing the heroic communist struggles against foreign imperialism and constructing their visions for the socialist future. 

i. Making a War Photograph

Most of VNA’s first-generation photojournalists entered the profession with hardly any technical training in photography. They were enlisted from other professions, many were students from elite universities, many were journalists turned photographers. Luong Xuan Truong, a former VNA photojournalist and the son of renowned war photojournalist Luong Nghia Dung, said [13] his father was originally a physics teacher at the Military University of Culture and Arts before he worked as a photojournalist. Luong Nghia Dung and his fellow comrades, the war photojournalists Doan Ty, Hua Kiem and Vu Tao, were sent by the Army’s photographic department to go through an express six-month training program in photojournalism and journalism organized by VNA in 1965, before they were deployed to the frontline the following year. These army photojournalists, led by Van Bao and later joined by other VNA photojournalists including Lam Hong Long, Chu Chi Thanh, Huu Thu, Pham Hoat and Xuan Lam, made up a group of trailblazers of the Northern Vietnamese revolutionary photography [14]. In only a few exceptions, some liberation photo/journalists were sent to study journalism in allied countries in the Communist Bloc, most commonly in the Soviet Union, China or the GDR. The allies were also the main suppliers of technical and camera equipment for the liberation news agencies, which oftentimes struggled with a paucity of resources. 

Before he was sent to Leipzig to study Journalism at the Karl Marx Universität in the last year of the war in 1975, Chu Chi Thanh, a now retired, former war photojournalist, former VNA’s head of visuals department and President of the Vietnam Association of Photographic Artist (VAPA), had spent his early 20s in the late 60s working on the ground for VNA. Thanh covered some of the most intense battles in Northern provinces between 1967 and 1972, notably the supply routes from the North to the South that were often severely battered and disrupted by American aerial bombardments. His film cameras were an Exakta and a Praktica, both of which were made in the GDR and provided to him by his employer VNA. Like many young photojournalists who only just started at VNA, he had no telephoto lens  (because of their scarcity, only experienced photojournalists could have access to them), which in turn would require him to get close to his subjects to photograph despite imminent physical dangers in the conflict zones. 

During his long-term field trips, Thanh would develop his own film in a makeshift darkroom concocted in air-raid shelters, sometimes at a military base, sometimes in residential areas. He would bring his own chemical, film papers, and his three iron bowls: one to load, one to wash, one to develop, and hang the blown out samples in the darkness of the bunker. The development process would be navigated through instinct and estimation, despite his inexperience in the trade, most of the time without control of temperature and under erratic heat and humidity. While photojournalists of the western press were mostly working independently and could choose to leave the conflict zones whenever they wished, their engagement in the war often seen as more temporarily, spatially bounded and event-driven (See Note 4), the liberation photojournalists treated their job as a noble duty, a commitment to the national salvation, and would hardly be able to afford to leave the hardships of the battlefield. Their assignments could take them away from home for months, years, or even until after the liberation in many cases, preventing them from seeing their loved ones, which made their work, and in the end, their sacrifices, not so different from that of the liberation soldiers. In fact, as they were both photo/journalists and part of the army personnel, as in the case of Luong Nghia Dung for example, many liberation photojournalists also performed double duty, reporting the war while also carrying supplies, weapons [15] or messages; some reportedly even fought along the Vietnamese guerillas during ambushes [16]. 

When he was not working around Hanoi where he was usually based, Chu Chi Thanh would be sent by VNA to cover significant events or developments elsewhere faraway in the North or further to the central region, all the way to the DMZ, the distance of which could take him days to travel to. To make it even more challenging, there were no cars, no military vehicles, no airplanes available for embeds, he would just arrange the travels himself and would get to the deployed place by bike, most of the time without military protection and under constant threats of interference from airstrikes. “From Hanoi to Vinh Ninh it was around 500 km,” Thanh recounts [17]. “I was biking the whole time, just biking, from Hanoi to Vinh Ninh and back. One of the great things was, I could stop any time I saw an ongoing conflict zone and took photographs before getting back on track to the destination.” After Thanh developed his own films, he would send the film cartridges—all 36 exposures per 35mm roll and not a missing one [18], captions and sample images, back to his editor in Hanoi, the delivery of which would be at least a week, and the photographs might have likely ended up being no longer newsworthy by the time they reached the newsroom. Though they would not make the news, the selected images would be saved for references [lưu tham khảo], if the editor could see value in them. 

In 1973, when VNA started to equip the Liberation News Agency (LNA) with teletype machines, it improved the internal communication and news exchange between the news agencies, albeit difficulties still persisted due to low techniques and fraught conditions. Le Cuong [19], a former photo editor working for the LNA during this time, said a major part of his work involved sending images via radiophoto to the northern bureau of VNA, as his mobile photo department became the single provider of news photographs from southern Vietnam for Hanoi as well as foreign wires. Their makeshift office, camped in a forest near the border with Cambodia in Tay Ninh province, was in a nylon tent covered by leaves and tree branches alongside tents of the LNA news and technical divisions. The heavy, bulky teletype machines were left running in the woods the whole day, making loud noises while blinking their green and red signals, collecting while transmitting waves of photographs to and from Hanoi. LNA would receive photographs by its guerrilla photojournalists based in the southern-central, southeastern and southwestern parts of what was then the Republic of Vietnam, brought to the makeshift bureau physically via messengers or directly over by the photojournalists themselves, before the editors then selected a shortlist and sent them daily to the Hanoi VNA bureau. Each photo transmission via radiophoto, Cuong said, would last between 15 to 20 minutes, and the quality of the image could be tampered with by bad weather or obstructions that weakened or attenuated the signal strength. The received wirephoto from the North, likewise, would often be grainy, blurry, glitched, and would require retouching most of the time. As it turned out, this scarcity of resources would in effect contribute significantly to the making of the Vietnamese war image, as it placed constraints on photo editors of the diversity and choices of visuals, forcing them to make difficult decisions to either disseminate, or kill the images.  

ii. Properties of a War Photograph

In 1972, when Luong Xuan Truong was just six years old, his father Luong Nghia Dung was killed in action while covering the Quang Tri battleground. Truong grew up getting to know his absent father through stories that he got to hear from his former comrades and colleagues, as well as through the photographs he left behind. Despite his short-lived photojournalistic experience, within six years from 1966 to 1972, Luong Nghia Dung’s photographic legacy made him one of the most prolific war photojournalists in the Vietnamese resistance against the U.S., greatly admired by the younger photojournalists who followed his revolutionary footsteps [20]. His notable award-winning photographs, “Fire engulfing American warplane” [Lửa vây máy bay Mỹ], “Ngu Thuy artillery-women” [Nữ pháo binh Ngư Thuỷ], “Dashing” [Xốc tới] or “Conquering Post 365” [Đánh chiếm cứ điểm 365] [21], paint him as an avid and courageous photojournalist, who would not hesitate to jump into the heart of an active conflict zone or even in the back of a firing artillery, to capture the smoke, fire, and vivid human spirit of the frontline. Truong grew up to be a VNA photojournalist himself in postwar Vietnam, working in the same photographic department as his father once did, which granted him intimate access to his father’s archive of photographic contributions to the agency. Truong was also welcomed to many veterans’ meetings on behalf of his father, representing him in special occasions and events, talking about his work and life-long devotion to photojournalism. But as someone who can afford to take a distance from the war, and who lives to see the transition of its meanings in the aftermath of the war, Truong [22] exudes certain clarity when talking about his late father’s body of work: rather than output of a creative, artistic process, it reflects his devotion, his rigor, his fixated and almost religious ideology of communism. “My father’s generation was like the first followers [of the religion],” Truong told me, “They did everything with pure faith, a faith that resembles a religious belief, that they were fighting for an equal and free tomorrow, when there would be neither the rich nor the poor, or any oppression.”

In perhaps one of the first attempts of its kind [23] to revisit and bring Vietnamese war images to the public fore, the international photography exhibit “Requiem–the Vietnam Collection” [Hồi Niệm–Bộ sưu tập ảnh về chiến tranh Việt Nam] <[24] showcased images by 135 photojournalists from twelve nations who were killed in action between 1954 and 1975, including that of Luong Nghia Dung, first in the U.S. in 1999 and at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh city the following year. An initiative led by former American war in Vietnam veteran photojournalists Horst Faas and Tim Page, the exhibit juxtaposed photographs made by liberation [25] Vietnamese photojournalists alongside those made by photographers of different nationalities, including South Vietnam [Việt Nam Cộng hoà], working for the western press. But given the framework in which the photographs were curated (that demonstrated competing and polarized historical truths), the context (post-reform Vietnam against the backdrop of reconciliatory Vietnam-US relations), their funders and organizers (the Kentucky Requiem Project Steering Committee), what were the consequences of such an introduction of Vietnamese visual perspectives to the world? 

In her outstanding essay “Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Photojournalism and Divergent Visual Histories” [26], Christina Schwenkel, who attended the exhibition in person, called it “a site of contrasting modes of visual narration and representation” that emphasizes differences in terms of aesthetic and political positioning between the revolutionary and the western photojournalists. She looked at the different camera angles in relation to the subject (aiming downward, at eye level or upward), the ways subjects were portrayed, and the dominant themes in the photographs from the two opposing sides. While elements and composition in images by western photojournalists would depict explicit acts of violence and victimization that imply a sense of urgency and authority over its subjects, images by their liberation Vietnamese counterparts would “contrast sharply” by focusing on the everyday experiences during the war and by actively avoiding the dehumanization of Vietnamese bodies subjected to acts of terrors. Such gaps in the western and Vietnamese visual narratives remain unreconciled despite the exhibition taking place more than two decades after the war, and in postwar Vietnam, with the support of Vietnamese officials. 

Images by the Vietnamese liberation photojournalists hardly strive to be neutral or conceal their intent. The underlying motive was made transparent from the beginning, photography was just a medium for the mission. Chu Chi Thanh said when he started, it was clear to him that their assignments were three-fold: to propagate the Vietnamese victories, to capture the determination of the liberation soldiers and civilians, and to expose American military failures. This was more or less a pursuit of the idealized images of the fearless liberation soldiers, as well as scenes that characterize dominant themes  of Vietnamese war images: downed and inflamed  American aircrafts, artillery erupting in the horizon, or captured American pilots holding their heads down in shame. The figure of the soldier is somewhat venerated and beautiful, and for that reason, would most likely carry a woman's face [27]. This cynosure of liberation women is thus essential to the construction of the beautiful war image, unique to Vietnamese revolutionary photography, as women were seen actively and equally contributing to the communist struggles against the foreign enemy, the limitation of their physiques in stark contrast to the weight of their weapons. Yet women were hardly seen behind the camera in the frontline as photojournalists, their roles most likely reduced to the logistics, the military rear [hậu phương], staunchly backing soldiers or in this case, photojournalists, heading for the combat zone. The Vietnamese war image, as it imagines visions for the liberated nationhood and women’s emancipation, protrudes the male gaze. 

The deliberate construction of the beautiful war image, the conformity in their ideological message, have in practice, built up an aesthetical semblance that unlikely sets the photojournalists apart. Contrary to the work of many western photojournalists, whose photographic style can be traced  in their images, images of the liberation photojournalists hardly project their artistic ego or individualism, a trait no doubt antithetical to the communist spirit. While being advised what to photograph, the photojournalists were also reminded of what to avoid. In an interview [28] with Nina Hien, the late war photojournalist and former HCMC Photographers’ Association Lam Tan Tai said he regretted glossing over the ugly realities of the war. As it demonstrates the resilience of the Vietnamese liberation soldiers, the Vietnamese war image hardly shows the brutality of the war, the graphic components that would be more likely seen elsewhere in the work of western photojournalists. Deaths, casualties, miseries, and damages were perceived as weaknesses, and could potentially undermine the fighting spirit of the resistance. 

The photojournalists’ negotiation process between documentation and ideology, between what’s considered beautiful and ugly, was also the consequences of the editorial policies consistent with the revolutionary mission of Vietnamese wire agencies at the time. A great illustration for this is an incident that happened to Chu Chi Thanh’s photograph taken in Quang Tri province titled “Hai người lính” [Two Soldiers]. In 1973, Thanh was sent by the VNA to Quang Tri province to document the exchanges of political prisoners as a result of the Paris Peace Accords. When he passed by Trieu Trach commune (Quang Tri), he witnessed soldiers from the two adversarial sides, one defending the Republic of Vietnam, the other defending the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, sitting together, smoking and chatting about their everyday lives. “There I witnessed a special moment,” Thanh said in an interview with Nhan Dan newspaper [29], “it seemed that they were no longer enemies in the battlefield, but were friends. In that atmosphere, a Saigonese soldier was arm in arm with a liberation soldier and asked me to take a photograph of them together.” When he sent the photographs he took in Quang Tri, including a series from that one scene, his photo editor decided not to use the series. Thanh told me after three months working in the central region, he returned to Hanoi and found out that the editor also threw away the exposures that were part of the series for fear that the images might “fall into the wrong hands” and might be used to promote reactionary messages. But he could still find one single 3x4 film left of the series that he had developed himself to sample, and he asked the editor to let him keep it as a souvenir, which he has kept until today. Based on Thanh’s testimony and others’ [30], the incident was probably not an exception, but rather it suggests a routine editorial process that filtered out what was politically desirable and what was not. As a former photo editor at VNA himself, Thanh said that although he disagreed with the decision of the photo editor at the time, which he thinks was not representative of the news agency, there was another external factor that drove editors to make narrow selection of images, which was the limited space of exposure for photographs on newspapers, in correlation to the scant number of communist newspapers during the war. At the same time, editors also had to manage ways to adapt to the ill-equipped archival facilities that forced them to dispose of outtakes and undesirable negatives to save space for the negatives that were in use. 

The significant change in perceptions of Thanh’s photograph did slowly come later in 2007, more than three decades after the photo was taken, as he decided to exhibit it for the first time among his other photographs at the Vietnam National Museum of History in Hanoi and the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh city. One of the two soldiers photographed also actively reached out to Thanh and together they reconnected with the soldier fighting for South Vietnam in 2018, both of whom have still been living in Vietnam since the end of the war. Recognition for the photograph from the state level came most recently in 2023, as Thanh received the Ho Chi Minh prize for Literature and Arts for the series “Two Soldiers”, often regarded as the highest honor granted by the Vietnamese state and the Communist Party. Our perceptions on journalistic standards also changed through time, Thanh told me, “what was discarded then was seen as the bones [xương xẩu], the leftovers, but now it is their turn to demand us to look back.” 

Archive without Authorship 

As part of the press photography department, the Vietnam News Agency’s physical film photography archive houses more than one million negatives taken by VNA photojournalists from the foundation of the agency in 1945 until most recently in 2007. Located at VNA’s headquarter in the center of Hanoi, the archive is nonetheless only accessible to employees of the agency’s photographic department. To visit it, one must first enter via the office space shared by a few VNA’s photo editorial staff, where technicians scan and retouch the negatives for latest uses, whether for an exhibition, a publication or simply per customized request. The archive itself is a tiny, windowless, low lighted room, climate–controlled to avoid fluctuating temperature and humidity, where film-based photographic materials are separated in polypropylene bags and arranged in steel boxes. Rows of heavy-duty file racks filled with those boxes envelope the entire roughly 15-square-meter room, leaving space for only perhaps one or two specialized freezers that are designated for rare photographic negatives at risk of deterioration or decay. On top of a few racks, the staff still keep the wooden cabinets that look like apothecary drawers, now standing empty, that were once used to store negatives by the previous VNA generations, as a memento of how the archival condition was back in the days. Here in this room, the perhaps biggest known collection of analogue film photographs by Vietnamese liberation photojournalists taken during the anti-American war between 1955 until 1975 is being preserved. 

The photographic archive at the Vietnam News Agency’s headquarter in Hanoi. Photo courtesy of the author.

According to Dinh Ngoc Lien [31], deputy-head of VNA’s photographic department and manager of the archive, one third of the photographic films they have were taken during the French and American resistance wars, mainly in black and white. Despite poor infrastructure to archive film during the wars and in the years that followed, Lien says that the condition of the negatives remains mostly stable, though there are scratches and dust here and there, which requires correction carried out routinely by VNA technicians in the adjacent room. Like pretty much elsewhere before the 1990s, the film base for the negative emulsion at the time was cellulose acetate, a material likely subjecting film to shrinkage, warpage and vinegar syndrome if not cared for properly;  so given the scanty archival condition during wartime, light to medium damages seem hardly avoidable [32]. As a result, one of the most urgent tasks when it comes to preserving the archive is to digitize them. 

Originally a news editor with barely any experience in photography, Lien was assigned by her seniors to take over the photo-archive and to create a database for the negatives, which required learning specialized technical aspects on the job. The project started in 2012 and was supposed to last only until 2014, but due to the massive scope of the archive and the limited resources of the photographic department, it has extended up until today. So far, VNA staff have been able to scan less than 10 percent of what they have, at about 100,000 negatives in total, mainly from 1990 backwards. Those that have been digitized would then be numbered and cataloged by handwriting in a photo maquette, which the staff can use to look up information on individual photographs and retrieve them as needed. The images are not grouped by either author’s name, series or year of creation, but instead, by theme and sub-theme. For instance, under Uncle Ho [Bác Hồ [33] ], guerrilla, anti-American war, anti-French war, community [quần xã], and so on. This seemingly archaic system of classification, which prioritizes content of the images over the creative authorship of the photographers, is an inheritance to the classification system that dates back to the 1960s, when the photo-archive unit within the VNA photographic department was set up to serve the growing demand to store negatives of war documentation. Lien could find flaws in the system, in both aspects of preservation and classification, but she learned to adapt them to the current needs of the image usage. Together with her team of a few VNA employees—which, from the impression of my visits to their office, were made up mainly of women—Lien has been overseeing the set-up of an electronic database for the images while continuing to log them manually into the photo-maquettes. Now as more images have been digitized, the amount of maquettes used to catalog them has also progressively piled up, which would soon mean that the staff would need storage space just for the maquettes themselves.

Demands for images from the American war in Vietnam have been consistently high. The photo-archive’s clientele is diverse, though mostly connected to the state level, such as state-owned newspapers, ministries, state departments, foreign embassies. But the demand also comes from individuals who have personal connection to the images like family members of the photojournalists (as in the case of photojournalist Luong Xuan Truong) or the people who were photographed. How the images are used also varies, such as for an article, an exhibition to commemorate an event in history or simply to remember a loved one by: the Vietnam Disaster Management Authority wanted to chronicle the different ways Vietnamese people prepared for heavy storms and flash floods as a lesson for the present; the Ministry of Transport wanted to zoom in on the bridges they built in the 1960s and 1970s to celebrate their achievement during wartime;  a daughter wanted to find images of her father who held a key position in the communist government. 

Though in theory, access to the archive is possible on both institutional or individual level, the clients would first need to submit a form declaring their purpose of using the images, which must be approved by the archive’s management before they may browse through the photo-maquettes and select images that they want to enlarge. Raw stock is definitively unattainable, and hardly no one is permitted maximum enlargement of the original print, a policy enforced by VNA to protect negatives that can no longer be replicated, especially those documenting the two wars. For this reason, clients are basically only allowed access to medium to small digital copies of the scan of the original print. Due to Vietnam’s lax copyright law enforcement, images of the war are often prevalently used without VNA’s permission, even without credit, by different groups including other government entities or big state-owned media. It is a gray area that many war photojournalists [34], as well as their editors, now feel trapped in between, because while the images are treated as national properties for their role in visually narrating the Vietnamese history, which make them part of the communal products shared by those belonging to organs of state, they are also journalistic, creative work by photographers who risked their own lives documenting the war, hence deserve to be seen as such. Lien’s calling, ever since she could see the importance of the images she is protecting, is to credit them to their rightful owners. Yet it is not uncommon for images made during wartime to be published without the author's name. Since it was a risky job that also made them a target [35] during conflicts, many revolutionary photojournalists used pseudonyms or left out their name entirely while sending in their photographs to protect their identity. The images would then be credited as TTXVN, short for Vietnam News Agency in Vietnamese, and the quest of the later generation including Lien is to figure out their original authors. Lien told me that it got tricky when, for instance, two or three photojournalists captured the same event together and both submitted pictures without credit. To get to the bottom of it, Lien and her team would have to trace down the tearsheets that might have run their photographs, or inquire their senior or retired colleagues to verify information, looking up and cross-checking at least two to three sources, a highly time-consuming and likely unfruitful process. In certain cases, the photographs are left without the names of its authors. 

Often construed as evidence of an imperial war, the images, as I elaborated in “Properties of a War Photograph,” are also documentation of continued Vietnamese lives during a turbulent period of history: beside air raids and battlegrounds, the Vietnamese were also building bridges, fighting against natural disasters, getting married, rearing children. The way the images are used in peacetime substantiates the motivations for why they were constructed in the first place: the idealized vision for the socialist nationhood has become the reality. In “The American war in Contemporary Vietnam,” [36] Christina Schwenkel describes how the Vietnamese war images are reframed and repositioned to connote “new historical truths.”  Through the management of enforcement of historical memory, museums are pedagogical sites that reproduce model citizens, and mobilize sentiments, sympathy and support for those who led the resistance, namely, the communist government. The images attest to historical truths and are visual evidence that cannot be refuted, but how they are constructed, curated, distributed and displayed within the Vietnamese context represents the authoritative accounts of history. In textbooks, on museum walls, the war images celebrate the lasting Vietnamese victories, martyring those who sacrificed for the national salvation while exulting over the ultimate freedom for a country chained for thousands of years by foreign forces. What they leave out, however, is as important as what they represent in the national collective memory. The diversity of the images that I have seen in the archive—many of those have yet to see the light of day—reflects the multitudes in divergent perspectives of what else could have been.   

Acknowledgement:  

In 2021 I was invited by the Dogma Collection to carry out research on revolutionary Vietnamese photojournalists who captured the American war in Vietnam, in response to Dogma’s own Battle Field Lens collection which features vintage prints of the two Indochina Wars that spanned close to three decades in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, captured through the lens of internationally renowned western photographers, as well as ones from Vietnam and elsewhere. The objective of the research was to illuminate perspectives from those lesser known Vietnamese war photojournalists, whose names and photographs of the American war are virtually uncharted outside the Vietnamese context. After much delay and interruption due to the pandemic, this research article was completed with the generous and patient support from Dogma as well as the photo/journalists and archivists of Vietnam News Agency who welcomed me into their photo-archive, showed me the processes of their work and shared with me great insight into the war images.

Yen Duong is an image-maker, award-winning journalist and editor based in Berlin, with yearslong experience working in Southeast Asia for various international media and NGOs. Previously based between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, she has photographed and written many critical stories throughout Vietnam, covering themes from human trafficking, environmental and natural disasters, to the impact of rapid urbanization on marginalized communities. Her personal projects, experimenting with multimedia formats, found images/footage and collages to explore the entanglement of public/private memories as well as their imprints in the Vietnamese contemporary landscape, have been exhibited in various international photo festivals including Objectifs Women in Film and Photography (Singapore), Photoville (New York), f2 Photo Festival (Dortmund) and Photo Hanoi 21 (Hanoi), among others. 

[1]

 

See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Can the Subaltern speak?”, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Macmillan Education: Basingstoke, 1988, pp. 271-313, 76. (Back to text)

[2]

 

See Kratz, Jessie (2018, January 25). Vietnam, the first Television War. U.S. National Archives. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2018/01/25/vietnam-the-first-television-war/. (Back to text)

[3]

 

See Sontag, Susan (2002, December 1). Looking at War. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war (Back to text)

[4]

 

Schwenkel, Christina. The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 57-58. (Back to text)

[5]

 

This article is merely a prefatory exploration of the Vietnamese war photojournalism landscape in compared to very few but rather comprehensive research on the role of Vietnamese photojournalism during the American war in Vietnam, especially the recently published book by Thy Phu called “Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam” (2022), in which she analyzed images from Vietnam and within the Vietnamese diaspora, to explore the many Vietnamese perspectives on the subject, the role and implications of the images in both public and private domains both during and after the American war in Vietnam. See also Christina Schwenkel’s book “The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation” (2009) for a thorough ethnographic studies of Vietnam’s visual and symbolic representations of memories of the American war. (Back to text)

[6]

 

See Nguyễn, Đức Hiệp (2014). Photography in Vietnam from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the Start of the Twentieth (E. Takata, Trans.). Trans Asia Photography, 4(2): In Translation. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0004.204. (Back to text)

[7]

 

See Nhiếp ảnh Việt Nam - Tự hào 70 năm đồng hành cùng đất nước (2023, March 16). Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. https://bvhttdl.gov.vn/nhiep-anh-viet-nam-tu-hao-70-nam-dong-hanh-cung-dat-nuoc-20230315100246267.htm. (Back to text)

[8]

 

See Đỗ, Phượng (2015, October 09). Thông tấn xã Việt Nam qua hai cuộc chiến tranh vệ quốc. Vietnam News Agency. https://dhtn.ttxvn.org.vn. (Back to text)

[9]

 

In 1976, Việt Nam Thông Tấn xã (VNA) merged with Thông Tấn xã Giải Phóng, a.k.a. Liberation News Agency, and officially changed its name to Thông Tấn xã Việt Nam a year later, which is technically just a swap of the name’s order. Their English title, Vietnam News Agency, remains the same. (Back to text)

[10]

 

See Vietnam News Agency: Strategic and Trustworthy Information Centre of the Party and State (n.d.). Vietnam News Agency. https://vnanet.vn/en/introl/vietnam-news-agency-trustworthy-and-strategic-information-centre-of-the-party-and-state-1033.html.(Back to text)

[11]

 

See Anh Tuấn, Xuân Khu, Thanh Vũ & Thành Chung (2020, October 5). 60 năm Thông tấn xã Giải phóng: Lặng thầm sau những dòng tin (Bài 2). Báo Ảnh Dân Tộc và Miền Núi. https://dantocmiennui.vn/60-nam-thong-tan-xa-giai-phong-lang-tham-sau-nhung-dong-tin-bai-2-post296298.html. (Back to text)

[12]

 

See 62 năm Thông tấn xã Giải phóng (12/10/1960-12/10/2022): Những người làm báo song hành cùng lịch sử (2022, October 12). Vietnam News Agency. https://dhtn.ttxvn.org.vn/tintuc/62-nam-thong-tan-xa-giai-phong-12-10-1960-12-10-2022-nhung-nguoi-lam-bao-song-hanh-cung-lich-su-10786 (Back to text)

[13]

 

From Author’s Interview with Lương Xuân Trường (2022, May 26). (Back to text)

[14]

 

See Phương Hà (2017, May 01). Những khoảnh khắc để lại’ của nhà báo - chiến sỹ Lương Nghĩa Dũng. Tin Tức. https://baotintuc.vn/nhan-vat-su-kien/nhung-khoanh-khac-de-lai-cua-nha-bao-chien-sy-luong-nghia-dung-20170426234307040.html (Back to text)

[15]

 

See Thông tấn xã Việt Nam và những bức ảnh mang tầm thời đại (2020, September 12). Vietnam Plus. https://www.vietnamplus.vn/thong-tan-xa-viet-nam-va-nhung-buc-anh-mang-tam-thoi-dai-post663054.vnp (Back to text)

[16]

 

See Hoàng Tuấn (2020, June 21). Thời “tay bút, tay súng” của phóng viên Thông tấn: Gan dạ chiến đấu. Vietnam Plus. https://www.vietnamplus.vn/ (Back to text)

[17]

 

From Author’s Interview with Chu Chí Thành (2022, July 09). (Back to text)

[18]

 

Multiple accounts from liberation photojournalists that I interviewed and cross-checked from Vietnamese media confirmed that missing film exposures as well as the agency’s technical equipment could lead to warnings or punishment from their news agency.(Back to text)

[19]

 

Lê Cương wrote a testimony of his own experience working as the photo editor for the LNA on the occasion of the 35 years of Vietnams’ Reunification in 2010. See Le, Cuong (2010, May 12), Phát telephoto từ R- chuyện giờ mới kể. Vietnam News Agency. https://dhtn.ttxvn.org.vn/tintuc/phat-telephoto-tu-r-chuyen-gio-moi-ke-357 (Back to text)

[20]

 

From a tribute by war photojournalist Phạm Hoạt to the life and work of Lương Nghĩa Dũng. See Pham, Hoat (2007, May 14). Nhớ anh Lương Nghĩa Dũng, Người chiến, nhà báo hy sinh trong chiến dịch giải phóng Quảng Trị. Vietnam News Agency. https://dhtn.ttxvn.org.vn/tintuc/nho-anh-luong-ngha-dng-nguoi-chien-nha-bao-hy-sinh-trong-chien-dich-giai-phong-quang-tri-1562 (Back to text)

[21]

 

I translated these titles of Luong Nghia Dung’s photographs based on their Vietnamese version. (Back to text)

[22]

 

From Author’s Interview with Lương Xuân Trường (2022, May 26).(Back to text)

[23]

 

It should be added here that in 2002, Tim Page and Doug Niven released the first international photobook on photographs taken by Vietnamese photographers called “Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the other side”, containing 240 pages of scanned negatives that the pair came into contact with via the Vietnam News Agency and private archives from the Vietnamese war photographers themselves or from their families. (Back to text)

[24]

 

Before it was turned into an exhibition in Vietnam and elsewhere, Horst Faas and Tim Page made a homonymous book called “Requiem: By the photographers who died in Vietnam and Indochina”, released in 1997. (Back to text)

[25]

 

I used the word “liberation” [giải phóng] interchangeably with “revolution” [cách mạng] throughout this essay to describe photojournalists working for the National Liberation Front (NLF), to stay loyal to their Vietnamese vernacular version [phóng viên ảnh giải phóng/cách mạng]. In their book and exhibition, Horst Faas and Tim Page often referred to the photojournalists as North Vietnamese, a term also repeated in the book “Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the other side” to make a distinction between photojournalists working for the NLF, most of them North Vietnamese, and Southern Vietnamese photojournalists who worked for the western press, but I argue that this labeling might be either ideological or inaccurate, given how many (photo)journalists working for Liberation News Agency [Thông tấn xã Giải Phóng], the Southern affiliation of the Vietnam News Agency, as well as a few other Communist newspapers, were southern and central Vietnamese. (Back to text)

[26]

 

Schwenkel, Christina. The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 50-75. (Back to text)

[27]

 

In “Warring Visions”, Thy Phu addressed the gendered dimensions of the Vietnamese war image, their focus on the revolutionary Vietnamese women and their involvement in the resistance, to suggest how their image projected and linked the two causes as imagined by socialistic aspirations, national liberation and women’s emancipation. See Phu, Thy. Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 83–118. (Back to text)

[28]

 

(See Nina Hien (2013). The Good, the Bad, and the Not Beautiful: In the Street and on the Ground in Vietnam. Trans Asia Photography, 3(2): Local Culture/Global Photography. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0003.202 Back to text)

[29]

 

See Sơn Bách & Thành Đạt (2023, May 19). Nghệ sĩ nhiếp ảnh Chu Chí Thành và câu chuyện về Hai người lính. Nhân Dân. https://nhandan.vn/ (Back to text)

[30]

 

See Bình, Nguyên Trang (2005, January 17). Những bức ảnh về chiến tranh là tài sản quý của quốc gia. Công An Nhân Dân Online. https://cand.com.vn/dien-dan-van-nghe-cong-an/Nhung-buc-anh-ve-chien-tranh-la-tai-san-quy-cua-quoc-gia-i324165 (Back to text)

[31]

 

From Author’s Interview with Đinh Ngọc Liên in Hà Nội (2022, July 05). (Back to text

[32]

 

This is a problem that not only VNA faced. In an interview in 2007 the People’s Police Newspaper (See Note 30), Lê Phức, the late photojournalist and former general secretary of Vietnam Association of Photographic Artists (VAPA) said beside external factors such as unstable ambient environment and poor archiving condition, the state of archiving photographic negatives in Vietnam is also affected by the fact that Vietnamese archivists working for newspapers and national archives were not properly trained, which resulted in negatives from the war being damaged or even lost. For this reason, some photographs saved in the archive are just photographic copies without negatives. (Back to text)

[33]

 

In this case, “BH”, shortened for “Bac Ho”, would be used as an identifier. (Back to text)

[34]

 

See Bình, Nguyên Trang (2005, January 17). Những bức ảnh về chiến tranh là tài sản quý của quốc gia. Công An Nhân Dân Online. https://cand.com.vn/dien-dan-van-nghe-cong-an/Nhung-buc-anh-ve-chien-tranh-la-tai-san-quy-cua-quoc-gia-i324165 (Back to text)

[35]

 

Among Vietnamese revolution media, VNA has the highest number of staff killed in action during the American war, at 260, including photo/journalists and technicians. See Vietnam News Agency: Strategic and Trustworthy Information Centre of the Party and State (n.d.). Vietnam News Agency. https://vnanet.vn/en/introl/vietnam-news-agency-trustworthy-and-strategic-information-centre-of-the-party-and-state-1033.html (Back to text)

[36]

 

Schwenkel, Christina. The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 145-175. (Back to text)