Photog Who Snapped Famous Vietnam Image Dies

By: The Associated Press Eddie Adams, a photojournalist whose half-century of arresting work was defined by a single frame, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photo of a communist guerrilla being executed in a Saigon street during the Vietnam War, died Sunday. He was 71.

Adams died at his Manhattan home from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, said his assistant, Jessica Stuart. Diagnosed last May, he quickly lost his speech but remained alert and worked into his final days.

"Eddie Adams was an enormous talent and an inspiration to generations of AP photographers and staffers. His courage and creativity left a mark that will live forever," said AP President and CEO Tom Curley.

In addition to his photographs of 13 wars, Adams' images of politics, fashion and show business appeared on countless magazine covers and in newspapers around the world. His portraits of presidents ranged from Richard Nixon to President Bush, and those of world figures included Pope John Paul II, Deng Xiaoping, Anwar Sadat, Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev.

But fame, instant, enduring and discomforting , resulted from a single photo taken Feb. 1, 1968, the second day of the communists' Tet Offensive, in the embattled streets of Cholon, Saigon's Chinese quarter.

Drawn by gunfire, Adams and an NBC film crew watched South Vietnamese soldiers bring a handcuffed Viet Cong captive to a street corner, where they assumed he would be interrogated. Instead, South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, strode up, wordlessly drew a pistol and shot the man in the head.

Adams caught the instant of death in a photo that made front pages around the world. It would became one of the Vietnam's War's most indelible images, shocking the American public and used by critics to dispute official claims that the war was being won.

In later years, Adams found himself so defined, and haunted, by the picture that he would not display it at his studio. He also felt it unfairly maligned Loan, who lived in Virginia after the war and died in 1998.

Adams won a 1969 Pulitzer Prize for the Saigon execution picture, among the more than 500 honors he received in his career, including a 1978 Robert Capa Award and three George Polk Memorial Awards for war coverage.