June 16, 2007

Much has been made of the fact that last weekend, when the beehive of L.A. paparazzi swarmed around the vehicle carrying a furloughed Paris Hilton back to the slammer, there was one well-known photographer who emerged with one of the two most revealing images, showing a cowering Hilton, sans make-up, convulsed in tears. (The New York Daily News headline, playing off (or, rather, contorting) Hilton’s courtroom plea that afternoon: “I Want My Mommy!”)

The man who nabbed one of the most widely published pictures, it turned out, was none other than Nick Ut, the award-winning AP photographer who had taken another famous photo of a young girl in tears: Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese war victim running down with a road, her naked body strafed with napalm burns moments after an American aerial assault. The 1972 picture, like a handful of others published at critical junctures in the war in Southeast Asia, helped alter U.S. attitudes toward the war and assisted in bringing about the conflict’s end, three years later.

The other prime picture appeared courtesy of Carl Larson, of the INF photo agency.

When Ut was revealed to be the man with one of the money shots, there was much moaning, much hand-wringing, much talk of bitter irony. How low have we have descended as a culture, came the chorus, when our war photographers are reduced to ambulance chasers stalking latter-day White Broncos, gathering in mangy packs and firing off cruel snaps of celebutantes!

And yet, I was quite proud of Nick Ut and Carl Larson. Their pictures were just what the mayhem demanded. They caught what so often escapes the attention of the cameras: the Celebrity Perp Bawl, one that is as much about Paris Hilton’s self-inflicted condition (she did bring both her imprisonment and her re-imprisonment upon herself) as it is about her victimization at the hands of a ravaging Camera Pack. Amid the media circus--in which the L.A. justice system, as usual, had utterly mishandled the internment of a celebrity and had made a mockery not only of itself but of the terms of her extended incarceration--here were steady-handed shooters who jockeyed into position and came away with the goods. Which is what paparazzi do, yes. But which is also what good journalists do as well.

There was no hand-wringing necessary. Ut and Larson, like many of the best photographers have done for decades, cover events. They are newsmen and chroniclers. They are as reliable in the trenches as they are on the rope line.

I was reminded of great photojournalists over the years who covered the high and the low, the mean streets and the palm-lined boulevards. I’m thinking of Robert Capa, certainly, and David Seymour (whose images of the human victims of war, now on view at New York’s International Center of Photography, seem to somehow counterbalance his studies of Audrey Hepburn, the pictures all dating as they do to a time when general-interest magazines like Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post provided the American public with needed doses of reality and fantasy, hardship and Hollywood. I’m thinking of virtually every photographer who ever shot for Life magazine, in fact, from Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White to Mary Ellen Mark and Harry Benson to Gordon Parks (who will be honored on Monday with a lavish awards dinner to jump start his Gordon Parks Foundation).

Although Paris, certainly, is a lesser light than virtually any of her Hollywood forbears, who are we to judge Ut and Larson any less as photojournalists? It’s the culture’s fault that it pays less attention to Haditha than to Hilton (a woman so conscious of how her image is consumed that she wore eye-liner and lip gloss for her mugshot session).

"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves..." William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar