Best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise
AWARD YEAR: 1997
AWARD NAME: The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award 1997
RECIPIENTS: Horst Faas, Tim Page
AFFILIATION: Random House
HONORED WORK: “Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina”
It is highly unusual for the Overseas Press Club to permit a single entry to win more than one award. For an exception to be made, the winning project must be extraordinary. That is a fitting description of the book “Requiem,” a compendium of images by 135 photographers who died in Indochina. We couldn’t deny this sometimes moving, sometimes shocking, always fascinating book the Robert Capa Gold Medal, since Capa himself died in Vietnam. And while there were many fine nominations for the Olivier Rebbot Award for the best photography in books and magazines, the judges felt that in that category “Requiem” also stood head and shoulders above the rest. The book was compiled by two men who were both inspired and scarred by their own experience in Indochina. Horst Faas, a senior picture editor at The Associated Press, in 1965 won the Capa award and, in 1972, the Pulitzer Prize for his photos from Vietnam. His co-editor was Tim Page, a British photographer who was seriously wounded in the war. Faas and Page went to extraordinary lengths to compile photos not just from Western photographers assigned to cover the succession of Indochina wars but also from unknown Vietnamese photographers who were assigned, generally as soldiers, to record the war’s victories and defeats, heroes and victims. The work took six years to produce, and the result is a gripping collection of pictures, some of which are very familiar to those with memories of the war, while others have never before been published. These haunting images are a magnificent tribute and testament to the enterprise and courage of 135 men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in their quest to bring the truth about Vietnam home.
This book also won the Olivier Rebbot Award for 1997. Read that award page here.
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