John Rich shot one of the most extensive collection of color photos of the Korean War and is featured in the November issue of Smithsonian.
CAPE ELIZABETH, Maine: On the June morning in 1950, when North Korean forces charged across the 38th parallel and attacked South Korea, John Rich was in a coastal villa in Japan anticipating a long soak in a wooden tub, its water heated by a fire underneath. But his editor at International News Service shouted on the phone, “Get your fanny back to Tokyo.” Days later, Rich was on a landing ship bound for Pusan, Korea. Along with his notebooks, he carried a new camera, a keepsake from a field trip led by Life magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan to an upstart lens factory, Nikon.
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| Korean War correspondent John Rich at work. |
During the next three years, Rich, one of the few and perhaps the only American correspondent to cover the war from start to finish, and snapped close to 1,000 color photographs of wartime Korea while reporting for INS and later NBC News. He meant the photos to be no more than souvenirs. “I’d walk around and bang, bang, bang,” Rich told the Smithsonian magazine. “If something looked good, I would shoot away.”
His snapshots included POWs, British gunners, Korean children at play, women pounding laundry in a river, Betty Hutton’s pumps as she danced for the troops, the argyle socks of the Scottish regiment marching and the camouflaged house of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. “He [Rich] had no idea that the pictures would constitute perhaps the most extensive collection of color photos of the Korean War, Smithsonian staff writer Abigail Tucker wrote in the magazine’s November issue.
About a decade ago, Rich, now 91 and an OPC member, started reviewing the photos that he had stored in a Japanese tea chest. Several of the photos were published in John’s local paper, the Portland Press Herald and in a South Korean newspaper. Forty of his photos were featured this summer in an exhibition at the South Korean embassy in Washington titled, “The Korean War in Living Color: Photographs and Recollections of a Reporter.” Rich spoke at the exhibit, and he told his personal story on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams on July 25.
His eyesight failing from glaucoma, Rich hopes to publish a book of his photos and them donate them to a museum.