31 Mar 1975 / Photograph / Artist: Willie Vicoy / Time and Newsweek magazines

For several decades the Vietnam War was covered extensively by the international press. This is one of the countless photographs Willie Vicoy produced in his coverage of the war as part of the news organization United Press International. Through the set of photographs to which this photo belongs, Vicoy covered the flight of refugees as North and South Vietnamese communists were battling the United States-supported southern government. When this was taken, President Nguyen Van Thieu had just surrendered a big part of South Vietnam to the communists.

A woman holds her stricken child and offers her to the camera. Cropped tightly like his other snapshots, the picture makes a moving statement on the war by offering three views: the middle-aged woman in peasant hat and clothes looks at her child, the baby looks at the camera, and the viewer looks at the photograph. The shifts in vantage points interrogate the objectives of a war that takes its toll on ordinary people as the conflict approaches its final confrontation in the summer of 1975. Behind them is the battle-scarred Vietnamese countryside that has experienced death and destruction for two decades by this time.

The photograph appears reproduced in color as cover of Time and Newsweek magazines, subduing the drama of the scene with a pastiche of other images from the earlier years of the war. What makes the focal picture particularly compelling is its isolation, done through narrow cropping, which could be seen in parallel to the bracketing of the experiences of millions of Vietnamese peasants reeling from indiscriminate bombing. While other war pictures revealed the mass of anguished refugees fleeing the scene of confrontation, this one focuses on a singular predicament of annihilation experienced by one mother. In this way, the image is universalized as the depiction of the Vietnam War and became crucial in the international community’s renunciation of American intervention. The plight of a people of a distant place had thus been foregrounded for the world’s eyes to focus on. The contribution of Vicoy’s work to Filipino photojournalism comes from his established presence in the coverage of international conflicts. Here Vicoy underscores how the Filipino photographer’s interest is no longer merely confined to national borders. It is especially significant that Vicoy, as an Asian, is able to depict the victims of war with empathy and humanity, thus influencing international public opinion on the human cost of the Vietnam War.