Larry Burrows
I would like to add nay tribute to the many rightly paid to Larry Burrows, the English photographer who established his reputation as one of the great war photographers with his work for Life in Vietnam. He was killed in a helicopter flying over Laos. It is always frightening flying in helicopters over Viet- nam or Laos, especially at monsoon times when the clouds are so low the helicopters are forced to fly at tree-height and cannot be missed by anyone shooting straight up from below. Burrows had done far more than enough: there was really nothing more to be photographed, as in a way there is nothing more to be written, about the look of the Indochina war. But a great photo- grapher always • thinks there exists a better Photograph somewhere, if he could only get there and get it. Photographers take far bigger and far more frequent risks than re- porters, and suffer correspondingly greater casualties. Larry Burrows was greatly loved as well as admired.
Once I brought some stuff—boots. I think, a camouflage poncho, and a set of khaki denims—belonging to Burrows from Da Nang down to Saigon, for what reason I forget. I still have it. I've been lucky, and cautious. In the Congo, Sandy Gall, Dicky Williams and I brought some stuff—a type- writer, a haversack of underclothes, paper- backs, toilet gear—belonging to a young Scripps-Howard reporter back to Leopold- ville (as Kinshasa then was) from Bakwanga. Re had gone too far down a dirt-track, become entangled in some confused fight- ing, a stray bullet hit the artery in his thigh and swiftly he bled to death. It is specific experiences, knowledge of individual people, killed or maimed, rather than any general awareness of what is and has always been going, on, that make most of us realise that violence is the great evil. Larry Burrows's photographs, more than the work of any other man, showed and still show us the evil of the violence of Vietnam; and in his photographs, as in the recollection of those who knew him, he will persist.
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