Eddie Adams

Eddie Adams (June 12, 1933 - September 19, 2004) was an American photographer.

Eddie is known for taking portraits of celebrities and politicians. As a photojournalist, he covered thirteen wars.

It was while covering the Vietnam War for Associated Press that he took his most famous photograph: the picture of police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner on a Saigon street, in February 1, 1968. Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for the picture, but he would later lament its notoriety.

On Loan and his famous photograph, Eddie Adams wrote in Time Magazine: "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths."

"What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?'"

Adams remarked that he would have rather been know more for the series of photographs he shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to Thailand in a 30ft boat, only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines. The photographs, and accompanying reports, helped persuade then President Jimmy Carter to grant the nearly 200,000 Vietnames boat people asylum. Adams remarked that "It did some good and nobody got hurt."

Eddie Adams suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and died in New York City from complications of the disease.