Horst Faas, AP combat photographer, dies at 79

Horst Faas, AP combat photographer, dies at 79 As chief of photo operations for The Associated Press in Saigon for a decade beginning in 1962, Horst Faas didn't just cover the fighting - he also recruited and trained new talent from among foreign and Vietnamese freelancers. But he was best known for covering Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in 1967 and won four major photo awards including the first of his two Pulitzers. "Horst was one of the fantastic talents of our age, a brave photographer and a courageous editor who brought forth some of the most searing images of this century," said AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll. He might have bled to death had not a young U. His health deteriorated in late 2008. Faas' Vietnam coverage earned him the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Award and his first Pulitzer in 1965. Burly but agile, Faas spent much time in the field and on Dec. A native of Germany who joined the U. -based news cooperative there in 1956, Faas photographed wars, revolutions, the Olympic Games and events in between. In later years Faas turned his training skills into a sequence of international photojournalism symposiums. Faas also helped to organize reunions of the wartime Saigon press corps, and was attending a mixture of those events when he became ill in Hanoi on May 4, 2005. Among his top proteges was Huynh Thanh My, an actor turned photographer who in 1965 became one of four AP staffers and one of two South Vietnamese among more than 70 journalists killed in the 15-year war. My's younger brother, Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, followed his brother at AP and under Faas's tutelage won one of the news agency's six Vietnam War Pulitzer Prizes, for his iconic 1972 picture of a badly burned Vietnamese girl fleeing an aerial napalm attack. Faas was a brilliant planner, able to score journalistic scoops by anticipating "not just what happens next but what happens after that," as one colleague put it. His reputation as a demanding taskmaster and perfectionist belied a humanistic streak he was loath to admit, while helping less fortunate ex-colleagues and other causes. He was hospitalized first in Bangkok and then in Germany, where doctors traced his permanent paralysis from the waist down to a spinal hemorrhage caused by blood-thinning heart medication. Although requiring a wheelchair, he continued to travel to photo exhibits and other professional events, mainly in Europe, and collaborated in the publishing of two books in French - about his own career and that of Henri Huet, a former AP colleague in Vietnam. Faas for a time shared a Saigon villa with the late New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, who said of Faas, "I don't think anyone stayed longer, took more risks or showed greater devotion to his work and his colleagues. Faas left Saigon in 1970 to become AP's roving photographer for Asia, based in Singapore, ranging widely on assignments. The same year, he won a second Pulitzer Prize, along with Michel Laurent, for gripping pictures of torture and executions in Bangladesh. In 1976, Faas relocated to London as AP's senior photo editor for Europe, until he retired from the news agency in 2004. Army medic managed to stem the flow. Meeting Faas two decades later, the medic recalled the encounter, saying, "You were so gray I thought you were a goner. On crutches and confined to the bureau, Faas was unable to cover the February 1968 Tet Offensive, but directed AP photo operations like a general deploying troops against the enemy. "Generally we had to go pretty far into the field but this was a situation in which the war came to us. Faas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world's legendary photojournalists in nearly half a century with the AP, died Thursday in Munich, said his daughter, Clare Faas. He was co-editor of "Requiem," a 1997 book about photographers killed on both sides of the Vietnam War, and was co-author of "Lost Over Laos," a 2003 book about four photographers shot down in Laos in 1971 and the search for the crash site 27 years later. In 1960, at age 27 and an AP photographer for four years, Faas began his front-line reporting career in the Congo, then Algeria. As the war ended in 1945, the family fled north to avoid the Russian advance on Berlin and two years later escaped to Munich in West Germany. Horst Faas, AP combat photographer, dies at 79 Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 13/05/2012