Eddie Adams (photographer)

Saigon Execution, 1968 During the Tet Offensive, Eddie Adams of the Associated Press photographed South Vietnam's national police chief, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, shooting a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, in a Saigon street on 1 February 1968. It won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and helped galvanise the anti-war movement in the United States. It is here as much for its afterlife as its impact. Adams came to regret it, believing the single frame could never explain the circumstances and had ruined Loan's life; in a 1998 eulogy he wrote that two people died in that photograph. Anyone judging the power of a news picture should know both halves of this story.