AWARD DATE: 1968
AWARD NAME: The Robert Capa Award for Superlative Still Photography Requiring Exceptional Courage and Enterprise Abroad
AWARD RECIPIENT: John Austin
AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: Life Magazine
AWARD HONORED WORK: “The Battle That Regained and Ruined Hue”
In the tradition of the great cameramen it commemorates, the Capa Award for 1968 is conferred for a series of battlefield action shots conveying vividly the stress and the struggle taking place.
The time was the disastrous Viet Cong Tet offensive last year, the place the furiously contested former capital, Hue. John Austin, the recipient, was a Stars and Stripes photographer at this interval, and only 21 years old. His photographs, published in Life Magazine under the title “The Battle That Regained and Ruined Hue”, were also used extensively by other publications.
His picture of wounded U.S. Soldiers on the tank is considered by many as possibly the best single photograph yet taken in the war in Vietnam.
Olsen was born in Evanston Illinois, in 1947 but since 1961 has lived with his family in Wayzata, Minn. His interest in cameras dates back to his tenth year, when his grandfather gave him one as a Christmas present.
Called up for military service in 1966, Olsen took basic training at Fort Jackson, SC., and then volunteered for Vietnam duty, arriving in Saigon in February, 1967. Six months later he was a combat photographer, remaining with Stars and Stripes until his discharge last June. Under contract to Life, he returned to Saigon for a time, but since February, 1969, has been the magazine staff photographer for the White House.
He is the youngest photographer ever hired by Life, and maybe the youngest ever to win a major US photographic award.