This is a collection of collections. including several from the Vietnam War by noted shooters, but also many from pre-war Vietnam, north and south, mostly by Vietnamese photographers. Enjoy!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/13476480@N07/albums/with/72177720296009971

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/culture/2022/01/262_322977.html

The Continental Palace was and is a hotel. It was upgraded around 2000. When I visited there in 2005 it seemed very modern and luxurious. The same was true of the Caravelle Hotel, just across the square.

The square was in front of the National Assembly building, which also remains, though it is no longer in use as Hanoi is now the seat of government.

The porch or veranda of the Continental Palace was enclosed in thick wire mesh to counter the propensity of passing terrorists to lob grenades into a place in those years mostly frequented by Americans. I met the noted journalist and author Neil Sheehan there one night. He hailed me as I was passing and had remembered me from when we both served at Camp Kaiser, ROK, in 1960. He was a finance clerk, while I was a machine-gunner and later a weapons squad leader in the 17th Infantry at that time.

It's my understanding that most of LIFE's shooters in those days used either a Leica or a Rollei, or both. The Rolliflex had both the advantage of a large negative and allowed the shooter to be less obvious about his subject.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/13476480@N07/albums/72157649006017973/with/16625886486/?fbclid=IwAR2lmzk7BM215nllNaNLSofp3SO2UpwFPUrAkY1Dfq7_TXZFGahY0CzddIQ

The link takes one to a LIFE Magazine piece about the October 1945 fight by "Annamites" to eject the British, French and Japanese occupiers. Anam was the southernmost of three French colonies in what had been known as French IndoChina. (Cochin-China, Annam, and Tonkin were the names of these colonies. Tonkin was in the far north, Anam in the south, And Cochin in between.) The men shown in these amazing photos were part of Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, later known as Viet Cong. Incredibly, the British, seeking to maintain their French ally's hold on these rice, rubber, and mineral-rich colonies, turned some of their defeated Japanese foes loose on the revolutionaries. It was during this time, as you will read in the text, that the very first US soldier died in what we now call Vietnam. He was US Army lieutenant colonel Peter Dewey, on assignment to the OSS, seeking to find and repatriate Army Air Corps and US Navy aviators who had been shot down over the former French colonies. He was mistaken for a Frenchman--he spoke fluent French--at a checkpoint and shot to death.

I was commissioned at An Khe, RVN, in November 1966. I started Infantry Officers Basic at Benning in January of 1967, and immediately thereafter became an assistant IO in the base Information office. In June of that year they sent me to DINFOS, then at Ft. Benjamin Harrison (Indianapolis) and after graduation I returned to Benning until May of `68 when I went to the Seventh Infantry Division at Camp Casey, South Korea, as the IO. So three years after I re-enlisted as an infantry private and was snatched up by the Second Divison IO, who needed a photographer and wasn't authorized one, I had the top job in another infantry division. Makes my head swim to think about it but at the time it was just duty, and take each day as it came. I was blessed with a fine staff or reporters and editors, and I trained a couple of shooters from the division signal battalion to shoot the kind of stuff we could use in The Bayonet, our weekly newspaper. It was good duty, good people, and I learned a lot. Also, it was a helluva lot better than going back to Vietnam as an Infantry officer.

We seem to be about the same age. I was born in 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor.

Unless you're quite old, or if you have worked as a photojournalist, the name Gordon Parks, Sr., probably won't mean much to you. But if you are an American, and especially an American of color, his work is something you will be glad to know about.

I met him just once when I was a very junior Public Information Officer at Fort Benning in 1967. I was escorting a couple of guys from National Geographic and we had lunch at the Officer's Club. Seemingly out of nowhere, Parks appeared and was invited to join us. I knew who he was, of course, because my road to a commission and a job as an Army Information officer had begun with nearly a year as a combat photographer with the justly famed First Cavalry (Airmobile), and this had brought me into contact with a who's who of the world's finest photojournalists.

Even before that, I spent half a year of evenings in libraries looking at back issues of America's best photo magazines--National Geographic, LIFE, Look, and Pageant.

The most important thing I recall from this chance meeting was that Parks had decided that print photojournalism was walking dead. He had enrolled in film school, and it was his intention to make movies. Which it was and which he did. And more's the pity that weekly magazines like LIFE and LOOK and PAGEANT no longer publish.

Anyhoo, here's a little peek at Gordon Parks and his work:

https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tVP1zc0TDbMKyjMS7IwYPSSS88vSsnPUyhILMouVijJSFXIzCvLLM5MyklVyE3MAwBvEBAv&q=gordon%20parks%20the%20invisible%20man&oq=Gordon%20parks%20the%20inv&aqs=chrome.1.0i355i512j46i512j69i57j0i22i30l2j69i60l3.11268j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&fbclid=IwAR1uUqZ4MorAcKSrsuyp0tmxNGTSkfNYsKh2X3JJDZq_2PV1_REq7o3waok

And, more generally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks?fbclid=IwAR2hCoayj9SnheQaIJaakpMAB18tMwYpLHvnEFZklHqOsCHJhhwo7Zy8JcA


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks?fbclid=IwAR0cTFneJSfoCJCn0N2K6kBpnQUCszNfHVJy7wcAwF54WNkPnF3IpUrI4AY

Since 1985, no Thanksgiving has passed without thinking of Ruth Orkin.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ruth+orkin&oq=ruth+orkin&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i512l2j0i512l7.2501j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

For a few years I was VP of the Southern California chapter of ASMP, and my principal duty was finding and convincing well-known shooters to come to a monthly meeting and speak, show some of their work, and take questions. When I learned the Ruth Orkin had business in Los Angeles, I contacted her. She agreed to come and make a presentation. A few years later, I was in New York for Thanksgiving, and among the dinner guests at my host's home were a couple of well-known shooters who also knew Ruth. They invited me to join them at Ruth's apartment on Central Park West, overlooking the park that was for many years her principal photography subject. It also happens that Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, a New York classic event, marshals and stages beneath her third-floor window.

But only Ruth is allowed to shoot through that window, her husband explained.

It's been many moons since that day, and Ruth Orkin is no longer among the living. Her work lives on. She was one of the world's leading street photographers, a peer and contemporary of the immortal Henri Carter-Bresson, Elliot Erwitt (who lived a few blocks from Orkin) and a handful of others in that pantheon. On this Thanksgiving Day, I invite all to Google her name and enjoy her work, which has stood the test of time.

It's always important to turn on your camera before it turns on you. Too late now!

I'd buy it for $100.00

Marvin Wolf marvinjwolf@gmail.com

Almost unbelievably so.

I was an Army combat photographer with the First Air Cav 1965-66. My shooting career was interrupted when I was made a second lieutenant, infantry, and then rotated back to Ft. Benning for some officer training. I spent the next eight years in staff and command jobs before resigning in 1974.

I picked up my camera and worked as a freelance shooter and increasingly a writer as well--a good 1,000 words would sell most photo stories shot on spec, eight or ten images at $300 each, give or take.

Then in 1983 I lucked into an opportunity to write my first nonfiction book, "The Japanese Conspiracy." Hardly had the dust settled when I accepted full custody of my 13-going-on-30 daughter. That soon ended my shooter career--can't travel twice a week and be a fulltime single dad.

Later this month I am going back to Seoul with that same daughter, who still lives with me. I just completed my 17th and 18th books (#17 is M-9, a mystery, and #18 "They Were Soldiers" is a nonfiction examination of 49 Vietnam veterans and how they've done professionally and personnally since the war. That will be published in May 2020, though it is available for pre-sale order on Amazon.

As an intro to my shooting side, I here post an essay from a dozen or so brief visits to Seoul, 1972-74.

Terrific work.

A Google search reveals that the world's cheapest country to buy cameras is...United States of America. That's why few Customs agents bother with camera equipment carried by returning travelers.

This was not always so. In the Sixties and Seventies, Japan was by far the best place for Japanese cameras, but Hong Kong was the cheapest for cameras and lenses in general. When I bought cameras in either place, I was given a form to give to local Customs on exiting the country, which saved me the expense of VAT.