Some photographs are so highly charged with emotion that they become unforgettable events in themselves. United States Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima was one such photograph; the living skeletons of the Nazi concentration camps were others. One of the most shockingly memorable pictures of recent years is the one at right, which, like that of the Iwo flag-raising, won a Pulitzer Prize. Edward Adams, an Associated Press photographer, snapped it at the very instant when Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam's national pollee chief, put a pistol bullet through the head of a suspected Viet Cong terrorist, whose hands were tied behind his back. In a country already numb with killings, one more death might hardly have been expected to stir a ripple. But recorded as it was by the camera and reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the world, Adams' photograph was immediately seen and felt for what it was: a terrifying summation of war, death and man's timeless brutality to man.
EDWARD T ADAMS : Execution of a Suspected Viet Cong Terrorist, 1968
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