Original subtitles

- Honest to God.

I mean, I was only 93 when I fell in love

with an 84 year old.

We've now had more than a year together

and it's wonderful.

If I can do it, if we can do it,

why can't everybody?

There has been a recent fad in Paris.

I don't know who started it

of buying a padlock and putting the names

of two lovers on it

and then locking the padlock to the railing

of one of the bridges over the Seine

and since everybody was doing it

my lover, Pat, and I decided we would join the crowd

and now there are so many locks we can't even find ours.

Here I am, practically 95

and I am having the time of my life.

I am just having a ball.

I don't know, it is just crazy,

it's just absolutely crazy.

Pat and I laugh almost every day.

At how crazy our lives are.

She's only 86

and I can't resist being an optimist.

I don't know why.

The world is in terrible shape,

but maybe it's because there is so much to do

that I'm optimistic.

I have realized how fortunate I am

when I look at the unfortunate.

I have lived through terrible times,

but I have been lucky enough.

I've never had to worry about where

my next meal was coming from.

I have seldom had to worry about where I would sleep.

I'm grateful for what has happened to me in the past.

Photo journalists seek the truth.

They feel that it's important

for people around the world

to know the truth about the world.

Photographers, war photographers,

the best, they all had a basic understanding

of the tragedy of war

and that's why the serious photojournalists

are so dedicated

and I think that dedication can come through the camera.

You have to be a little crazy

to be a photographer who goes to war

and who really goes to war and gets up to the front.

To do it seriously

means a great personal sacrifice.

Truth is the objective of good journalism.

Beauty is secondary to the truth,

but the great photographers usually manage

to get pictures which are not only truthful, but beautiful.

There is a tragic beauty in the world,

which has been shown over the centuries

in paintings and sculpture

and it's recognized now in photography as well.

I am a journalist, but not a reporter

and not a photographer.

I am a picture editor.

For more than 50 years I have hired scores of photographers,

some of them famous, others unknown.

I have testified for them in court

and nursed them through injury,

fed them, buried them.

I have bought and sold their pictures

for what must total millions of dollars.

I have sent them out on assignment,

sometimes with a few casual suggestions,

other times with detailed instructions,

but always the challenge is the same,

get the picture.

The editor chooses among those pictures

to tell it as it was or was it.

Right or wrong, the picture is the last word.

That's one of Manhattan's historic sites.

I spent my wedding night there,

September 30, 1939,

my first of three wives.

Hitler had just rolled into Poland

and we were apprehensive we couldn't even get married.

I would be too busy with war news.

I was working for Life Magazine,

but sure enough we got married in Chicago

at eleven o'clock, flew to New York.

It was a hotel just a few doors from Essex House.

Essex House has a lighted sign that shows up a night

and one night some pranksters either burned out

or extinguished the two first letters

which was kind of a joke around New York for a while.

It took a while to repair.

Anyway I just,

I get nostalgic when I see this place.

Can't help it.

I had begun working for Life Magazine

as an office boy in 1939.

Life was the number one large format illustrated magazine

in the entire world and by '43

it was selling probably three or four million copies a week.

These were the days before television.

It was hard for Life to keep up with the demand.

The lead story in Life had to be strong pictorially

or it wouldn't be the lead story,

so for me, I accepted that as a principle

and I continue to this day to think

in terms of picture first and text second.

Germany invades Poland

in the free state of Danzig.

The efforts and hopes of diplomats for a peaceful settlement

are transformed into the roar of gunfire.

- Almost at the same time

the war broke out in Poland.

Poland is in ruins.

- My wife, Mary Adele, became pregnant

and we were transferred to Los Angeles

to what had been usually called the Hollywood Bureau.

- Once a year,

Hollywood honors its brightest stars.

Tonight they also solute the 27,000 men

of the cinema industry now serving in the armed forces.

- It was quite something

to be a Hollywood Correspondent for Life Magazine at aged 24

which is what I was when I arrived there.

The Hollywood Bureau had provided coverage of movies,

beautiful girls and cover girls, especially.

That's where I got my first taste of war

because Pearl Harbor occurred on my 25th birthday.

So I'll never forget that birthday.

December 7, 1941,

I was about to celebrate my birthday

with a dinner that night.

Del, my wife, was in the kitchen baking a birthday cake

and she had the radio turned down.

- We interrupt this program

to bring you a special news bulletin.

The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air,

President Roosevelt has just announced.

- It produced shockwave through the whole country

that America was actually under attack.

- Since the unprovoked

and dastardly attack by Japan,

a state of war

has existed

between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

- My impulse was for me to get a photographer

and start photographing whatever there was to photograph,

but what was there going to be to photograph, you know?

Pearl Harbor was a long way away,

so the obvious thing was for Japanese American Colony

in downtown Los Angeles, which was called Little Tokyo.

The FBI had gone to work immediately rounding up

Japanese of the three generations

and suddenly, instead of being ordinary fisher folk,

were enemy aliens.

America was in total alarm

and it wasn't long before

thousands of Japanese were rounded up

and in turn behind the High Sierras.

With another Life photographer named Eliot Elisofon,

I went to the assembly point on the day

the very first convoy of Japanese Americans

left under army escort for the camp

called Mandazar in California.

That was the lead story in Life of the 1st March, 1942.

It was one of the most tragic episodes in American history.

Then tragedy struck.

Our baby died,

it was a crib death

and it was a terrible shock.

From that time on,

we were just as happy to be going back east

and I was kind of relieved, when after a few months later,

I was transferred back to New York.

Del was fortunately pregnant when our first child died,

so three months later we had our second child,

who is now sixty seven,

named Holly.

The first was Mary Heather and she was Mary Holly.

In the summer of '43

the war was at its worst.

I mean these were grim times

and there was one major spot open in the Life hierarchy

and that was picture editor in London.

And when I arrived in '43, you could see the damage

that had been caused by the 1940 Blitz everywhere.

Little did we know that at that very time

the murder of thousands of Jews would begin

in what is now known as The Holocaust.

I didn't realize how truly grim that period was

until the pictures came to light in 1945.

The invasion of Western Europe was impending.

We never knew when or where it would happen.

All over the world

the United States Army is on the alert

to defend our country against aggression.

For more than one full year,

they're pouring into Great Britain

a torrent of war implements,

tanks, guns, weapons beyond description

and men, American Soldiers,

at the rate of 150,000 every month.

- I had six photographers, accredited,

working for Life,

but everyone expected that Robert Capa,

who had already been covering war,

everyone looked to Capa to get the Great War pictures.

D-day has come.

Early this morning, the Allies began the assault

on the North Western face of Hitler's European fortress.

- I had a full crew of people waiting in the office

at Dean Street, the lab staff was waiting

and there were no pictures, no word.

My deadline for first D-day issue of Life Magazine

was at 9AM Thursday

and we waited again all day Wednesday.

It was really getting agonizing.

Here was the greatest military operation in history

and there were no pictures yet.

Finally, a packet of Capa's pictures with the actual landing

on the beach, code named Omaha, came in the early evening.

There was a note to me saying,

"John, all of the action is all in

"the four rolls of 35 millimeter."

I ordered the darkroom to give me

contact prints as fast as possible.

A few minutes later, a darkroom lad

came rushing into my office saying,

"John the films are ruined.

"You were in such a hurry,

"I put them in the drying cabinet.

"Made the emulsion run

"and there's nothing to be seen."

I couldn't believe it.

Then I ran back to the darkroom with him

and I held up the rolls, one at a time,

and the first three rolls, there was nothing, just pea soup.

On the fourth roll, thank God, there were eleven frames

which could be printed.

- So it went on the beaches of Normandy

this fateful day in June.

Hitler's fortress had been cracked.

The Great Gamble had been won.

Having accomplished what many European Military--

- They were the first the world saw

of the biggest operation in modern military history.

- I've covered many, if not most, of the wars in our world

in the last 30 years,

so I've seen certainly my fair share

of conflict and difficulty

and danger and human suffering

and I wouldn't want to be pollyannaish about that.

It has marked my life.

It has left a lot of traces

on my heart and my existence.

When I would come back from trips

that involved a lot of hardship

it was always really helpful for me

to share what I saw and felt with John,

who, himself, had known other people who had, like Capa,

like Cartier-Bresson,

like all of the great Magnum photographers

and on and on.

That he could share a sense of perspective.

- Robert Capa, I always called him either Bob or Capa.

He was one of the first who covered war candidly

with small cameras.

He was a Hungarian refugee in France

and had been living in Paris when the war started.

Bob became, you know, he was called

"The World's Greatest War Photographer."

He would have hated that.

He became involved with those around him.

He talked to the soldiers.

He was one of them.

And it was not so much his photographic approach

as it was his human approach to war.

Bob simply shot was there, but he came in close.

He was kind of a victim of his own reputation.

He had taken an extraordinary picture,

covering the Spanish Civil War,

of the Falling Soldier which is controversial to this day.

It went totally unquestioned for 30 years

and then, all of a sudden,

a British Journalist named Phillip Knightley

said that it had been perhaps set up.

He couldn't have set up the picture if he wanted to

and I think the picture was kind of a fluke.

I doubt if he even knew he had captured that moment

until he finally saw it published.

For me, the Falling Soldier

was something I never talked about with Capa

because I think it was a painful subject for him.

Who wants to profit from the death of another man,

a comrade, if you wish?

After D-day, the action of course had shifted to France,

so I decided that I get to France myself.

Walking ashore on Utah Beach,

I was given a cot and the same tent

that Capa and two others correspondents shared

at the first army press camp.

My job was to go to the front every day with a photographer,

not always a Life photographer.

One day a group of German prisoners was brought in.

I saw the face of this child soldier.

He looked to be about fifteen.

I thought as I took his picture, "You poor kid."

For me, it was like a lesson in warfare.

I saw...

enough bodies,

enough wounded to realize how,

how terrible war really is.

I am an anti-war person

and yet I've had to cover war.

I have seen blood around me.

I've been shot at personally,

but I was very lucky in that I truly escaped

the horror of war.

- Journalists came under sniper attack today

at the Cornithia Babs Hotel in Tripoli

where numerous foreign correspondents were based

just days after 33 journalists were shot--

- Sadly, war correspondents

have become targets in modern war

and whereas war correspondents used to be drive

in vehicles marked "press" and that gave some immunity.

Today's war correspondent is often a victim of conflict

and we have lost some brilliant photojournalists

just in the last year.

- Off your guard for a second

and you were a sniper's target.

- This is very disturbing.

It's given a new dimension to war photography

and I am not sure that I know how to adjust to it.

- We are close to being

in dangerous situations all the time.

I have had narrow escapes.

I always touch wood.

I have many of my colleagues who have been wounded,

have been killed

and I'm very lucky, I am proud

that I've managed to get in and out of places

with myself and my team intact.

Before,

mostly journalists were viewed by both sides

as a way of getting their message out.

Journalists were viewed by and large

as neutral observers

and yes, there were many journalists who were killed,

who were injured, but by and large it wasn't deliberate.

They were mostly caught in the crossfire.

When it got to Bosnia and the war in the Balkans,

the dynamic shifted

and that was when journalists started to be

really deliberately targeted

because certain sides didn't want the story getting out

and that has simply increased in the years

since the early 90s,

so that right now the leading cause of death

amongst journalists is deliberate, it's murder,

amongst journalists who cover world events

and amongst journalists who live in those countries.

- I covered a war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

It was this war between Azerbaijan and the Armenians.

That was in '93

and because of our history of working in the caucuses

we were very curious to go to Chechenya.

As soon as I got there, all these journalists,

there was a place called Manuka Square,

they were all standing around

and all of a sudden the Russians start dropping these bombs

and these people, they were the target,

and everyone went running for their lives.

- It was just then we were told

to flee for our lives

only seconds after the deafening blast,

the warplanes returned.

- I was with another photographer

and we went running into this building

that was nothing but glass.

I mean, it was like something out of the movie Die Hard,

I mean it was just unbelievable,

glass just exploding everywhere.

I am dropping cameras.

I am dropping films.

I'm ripping off the vest.

I am scared out of our minds.

We ran smack into this brick wall

and we couldn't go any further.

I thought we were going to die at that right moment

and then stopped bombing us

and I looked around and I said,

"Holy shit, this is real."

I realized that I was not a journalist anymore.

I was also a victim.

It became real that the Russians

were really prepared to bomb Chechenya to smithereens

and they weren't gonna care if you

were a journalist or whatever.

They were just out to just totally destroy

and they were dropping very serious bombs.

We saw a dud once.

It explodes,

makes this great little firework display

and then it breaks down and then it's supposed to

unleash all of this metal and...

It's like and you're like, there is nothing to protect you.

So you really identified with the people on the ground

and that's what happened.

In the end there was like I think only 24 journalists

which had covered the story

and the rebels immediately realized

that these guys were serious people

and they were going to stick it out with them

and so they were ready to give you cars,

they were going to give you places to stay.

So the whole way of covering conflicts really changed.

It wasn't like Bosnia,

it wasn't like anything anybody had ever experienced before.

This was a real war with a super power.

- The fact that journalists are targets

is a testimony to the power of journalism itself

to actually intervene

in the agenda of the warring parties

who would like so much

to totally control the agenda themselves,

but once journalists enter into it

and the mass awareness is created,

they can no longer totally control the agenda,

then there is public opinion

and I think the fact that journalists are willing

to put their lives on the line

is also a testimony to the fact that they believe

that people's opinions matter.

The mass awareness counts for something.

- Today, it's become worse than ever

to become a war photographer,

more hazardous because there's no front lines.

I can't believe this place.

I came here about the 1st September, 1944

and there was a Sherman tank right there

and I went to, made my office at the Hotel Scribe

and then we soon moved to that building

right on the corner of Place de Concorde.

I'm pointing to where I worked. It was incredible.

We were the cat's meow.

We ended up with two floors there,

but I had never been in Paris.

I had spent four weeks in Normandy covering combat

and Capa knew I wasn't, he knew my French was lousy.

Bob said,

"I have a friend who will help you

"and his name is Henri Cartier-Bresson," so what?

So the next day, he came to the door with his bicycle

and we spent the whole day together.

He was to become one of the world's most famous photographs.

Perhaps the most famous photographer of the 20th century.

So many things were going to happen

that I couldn't even have imagined.

It never once occurred to me that,

that I would be working with Cartier-Bresson

on a daily basis editing his contact prints and so on.

- He always said that thanks to John

his big reportage that he did in the Soviet Union,

John just was fantastic they way he sold it to Life

and to Match and to Stren, I think,

all the players at the time

and he always admired John's capacity for,

his business capacity apart from his artistic capacity

of seeing what is a good photograph.

- In 1953, I shot a picture which made me well known,

Eiffel Tower...

and John Morris was the one who saw

this picture on the contact.

I was very lucky to be able to go to the top

by walking on the Eiffel Tower,

taking pictures,

but it's a sign of the times.

I had only one film with me

because it was difficult to get film.

I had little money.

I made only one shot of the good picture.

The next shot was something else.

You shoot much better when you think.

When you take, "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."

No good.

"Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."

In photography, it depend on the eye.

All photographers know this approach

that you talk about somebody and you say,

"Yes, a good eye.

"He has an eye."

I learned it from Cartier-Bresson 60 years ago.

The billions and billions of people

who shoot with a camera, throwaway camera or anything,

most of them have no eye.

They know how to press a button.

Then they click.

- You never can say,

neither before, neither after shooting

whether it's good or not.

You know it after 20 years or 10 years.

- I had been away for 14 months

and I was really homesick.

I had a bad case.

I had a baby, my son John, was almost a year old

and I had never seen him.

I wrote a letter to my boss, Wilson Hicks in New York,

saying "Wilson, I want to come home."

Hicks agreed that I should come to New York before Christmas

and then to my great surprise, I was re-classed as 1A

and drafted into the Air Force the following June.

I was in Shepherd Field, Texas,

just finishing basic training

when the atom bombs exploded over Japan.

As soon as I had finished basic,

I got orders to report to Boeing Field in Washington

and went to work in the Pentagon.

The outfit I was assigned to

was an Air Force Intelligence Magazine called Impact

and it was my job to put the pictures in

and pictures of horrible things like the ruins of Hiroshima.

But not the human ruins.

That reported boasted about how cost efficient

the bombing of first of Europe and then of Japan had been.

In fact, General LeMay boasted that the atom bomb

was totally unnecessary that they had already succeeded

in wiping out Japanese war capacity

by burning one city after another.

- Although the end of Japan's aggression

was in sight before atomic bombing,

it was this terrific force

that finally signed her death warrant.

- The horrible thing is

that it didn't shock the public.

The public accepted the atom bombs as necessary.

I feel that the press let the world down in 1945

by showing the atom bomb as a beautiful mushroom cloud

instead of showing the atom bomb

for the terrible weapon it was.

Like most of the press, the western press,

I was a willing propagandist for victory in World War II.

I have since come to feel that there is no victory in war

and there hasn't been a war since World War II

that I could justify.

The adjustment was very rough after the war.

I went into the job market.

I was offered several different jobs,

but the job I took was picture editor

of Ladies Home Journal,

which was then the leading women's magazine in America,

the magazine that was selling, I think,

four million copies a month.

It was a totally different kind of journalism.

The journal, for example, had done a monthly story called

"How America Lives," choosing a different American family,

rich or poor, east or west, to report on each month.

I persuaded my editors to broaden the scope

by photographing farm families throughout the world

because I believed in showing

that people are people the world over.

The headlines were like "This is the way the world washes,"

"This is the way the worlds cooks."

In the spring of 1947, Robert Capa came to town.

Bob told me that he was hoping to go to Russia

to the Soviet Union with John Steinbeck,

so I asked for first look at Capa's pictures upon his return

because I wanted very badly to have a family

from behind the Iron Curtain,

as Winston Churchill had dubbed it.

Russia, today, is regarded

as a grave threat to our nation,

to our freedom, to the peace of the world.

- This was the beginning of the Cold War,

so I was a little bit adventurous

to sell the story on the people of the Soviet Union.

Here, in Russia,

you see the reason why we are spending

billions of dollars in defense production.

- So Capa came back, this was in early September,

and I said, "Let me see the pictures."

And I started looking through them

and they were just great pictures of ordinary life,

but taken with his warmth for people.

I found one picture of a Russian peasant woman

which was just right, that was the only picture

that could possibly have been a cover.

The advertising people on the Ladies Home Journal

were so afraid of being smeared as pacifists

or as peaceniks, if you wish,

that they didn't promote that issue,

but the public was fascinated

and the issue of the Ladies Home Journal

sold out almost immediately.

- John represents a continuum with history

and with a set of fundamental values

that are very meaningful to many of the photographers

who are still working today.

Photographs have a unique ability to create

a kind of human bridge between

people on other sides of the world,

from different cultures and different backgrounds

and you relate to each other as human beings.

I think that's the fundamental starting point

for resolving conflicts,

is that you are understanding

that there are human beings just like yourself

who are suffering, who are the victims

of injustice or aggression

and something has to be done about it.

- I've always believed that people

could live together peacefully

if they got to know each other

and the purpose, the journalistic purpose of people

was to show that the commonality,

the common problems of that people face everywhere.

I am an idealist in this respect, I admit.

It's crazy for me to be in Paris,

in a little park,

adjacent to the Del Pier Office that I have known for years,

but it's Magnum, a new Magnum Gallery

and to think that the outfit

that I saw founded in a New York apartment

with maybe 10 people drinking

from one magnum of champagne 62 years ago

has become an international institution

with photographers from Russia and Australia and Canada,

England, of course,

and many from France and Switzerland

and there's a show here that's just of the new people,

some of whom I scarcely know,

but I think it's wonderful and it's a miracle

that Magnum has survived all these years.

Magnum was formed partly

to establish rights for photographers.

Capa had the idea that a co-operative of photographers

could represent themselves and keep all the money.

I knew all the founders of Magnum.

We shared common goals, we'd all suffered through war

and depression in varying ways.

But it was in 1952, after Magnum was five years old,

Capa came to New York and said,

"It's time for you to join us."

So that's how I became the first and only executive editor

that Magnum has ever had.

Gene Smith was a remarkable photographer,

whom I first met when we both worked for Life Magazine.

We had gone different paths during the war.

He to the Pacific and I to Europe.

In fact, he was finally wounded on Okinawa

and was out of business for about a year.

He was hit both in the mouth and on the hand.

When Gene Smith resigned from Life he came to Magnum.

It was the natural place for him to come

because we shared his ideals.

Gene was passionately anti-war,

more than that, he was simply pro humanity.

He was one of those who was determined

that his pictures would make a difference

and he never stopped working toward that end.

- Magnum, for me, it's the place which is closest

to my use of ideals

and closest to when I first sort of started

this profession, or this life.

I came to it with a set of values

and in Magnum, it's the place, it's the community

where I found closeness to the values.

- Paulo Pellegrine is a totally new experience

to me in photography.

He takes pictures which at first made me very uncomfortable.

He didn't pay much attention to horizons.

I'm pretty much a conventional in terms of landscape,

at least I think for landscape, the earth is normally flat.

Paulo sees beyond the frame of his viewfinder

and he brings a sense of the outside world into his prints,

which is wonderful,

and he is also a man who deals in blocks and deep shadows.

He's a new kind of photojournalist,

whom I'm just getting used to.

- Ultimately, what really interests me

is to create visual records of things that man does

and so that helps you put what you do in perspective.

I don't necessarily think that my work has

a capacity to influence or impact

but I do think that if a revisionist,

a historian comes along and says 50 years,

concentration camps or whatever did not exist,

we have those documents, we have those pictures

of which testify that and today the same.

Today, I think it is important to go to there,

even though still the situation hasn't really changed

but it's still important to try and go there

despite all the difficulties,

to create those records.

This is one but probably the main driving force

of what I do.

Behind what...

- I heard the news of Robert Capa's sudden death

in Indochina the morning of May 25, 1954.

It's one of those dates that I can never forget.

It was such a terrible shock.

His mother held me a little bit responsible,

which was unfair,

but I was the one who had had to communicate to him

that he could have a Life assignment

covering the war in Indochina

which he had, to my shock, accepted

and at the end of about ten days there

he stepped on a landmine and died instantly.

- Mr. Morris, how are you doing, man?

- You don't call me Mr. Morris.

- I can call you John?

- Please.

I don't think I could work for the Times today,

I wouldn't qualified, especially those hours.

I have never worked for an afternoon paper

and I've never had a job where I had to come in

before 10 o'clock in the morning.

- That's incredible.

- I mean, one feels as though you are just

looking right down on the ambulance.

So you know another building

that gives you the same perspective?

- Not with this unrestricted view.

We did a story on taxi cabs in New York

and they were like go out to Broadway Street somewhere

and photograph all the taxis coming down and I was like

"What if I just went up to the 15th floor?"

So I went up to the 15th floor

and photographed, you know,

50 taxis in the one block span.

- You could do it right now.

- Yeah.

I also went to the roof

when the plane came down in the Hudson

because you can actually see where the plane landed.

- Could you see it from here?

- Yep, we shot the picture

that ran in the paper from the roof.

- Oh my God.

- Yeah, I mean, it's such a great vista on New York.

Have you seen the Pulitzer Hall at all?

- Yeah, I sure have.

I knew so many of those guys.

In 1967, to my great surprise,

I was offered the job of picture editor

of the New York Times,

which I regarded then and still regard

as the world's most important single newspaper.

- Meet the major problem of our time.

The problem of understanding the world we live in.

- The New York Times was

the world's paper of record and it was very, very important.

I think it's still the paper most read

by statesmen around the world.

It was a very distinguished newspaper

but it was distinguished for its writers,

not for its photography.

At that time, the Time, from a picture standpoint,

was a morgue,

so I was put in charge of that along with Arthur Gelb,

the Metropolitan Editor.

He determined the story content

and I determined the visual content

and we revolutionized the look of the New York Times.

- It was a very extraordinary summer.

I was hired in June of 1969.

The Mets had won the World Series.

Men had taken off for the moon and they landed on the moon.

On the same day that the men landed on the moon,

the night before, Ted Kennedy went off the bridge

at Chappaquiddick

and then there were riots as a result of Kent State.

Down in Wall Street there were some students

protesting what happened at Kent State

and all these workers up in the World Trade Center

came down and they started bashing heads.

There was a huge riot,

but the point is there was just very dramatic pictures

all summer long.

There was one big story after another

and John gave me the opportunity to work

on all of those stories, you know.

I mean, it really wasn't just a phrase open door policy.

You could go in to see him any time

and he would have functions for the photographers.

He would invite big, big names.

We would have dinner with Henry Cartier-Bresson

and Gjon Mili from Life Magazine.

Another time he had Gene Smith at one table

and across from him was David Douglas Duncan

and we got to see them argue and interact with one another

and we were just these young photographers

just in awe of the people he was bringing in, legends.

Legendary photographers.

Our heroes, you know,

and there were right there,

having drinks with them and so on.

It was extraordinary.

They inspired us really, they really did.

You would do anything for John.

He would ask you to do the impossible

and you would just go ahead and try to do it.

- The most important job that I had

as picture editor of the New York Times

was to propose pictures for page one.

What was put on the front page of the New York Times

at that time influenced the press of the entire world.

Spring at home

but unmindful of plot or calendar,

the Vietnam struggle goes on.

A Vietcong ambush a US Marine

rough rider truck convoy killed--

- As an editor for the Washington Post

and then of the New York Times,

I was supposed to be neutral in public toward the war

as I was supposed to be neutral in politics,

but I was glad when, in 1968, a picture came over the wire,

a photograph by Eddie Adams of AP.

- We see them pulling this guy out of a building

and they were like taking him by the hand

and they pulled him out on the street.

All of a sudden, to my left, somebody came out of nowhere

and I see him go for his pistol

and as soon as he raised his pistol,

as soon as he brought it up, I took the picture.

I thought absolutely nothing of it.

I go back to the AP Office and I dropped it off.

I said, "I think I got some guy shooting somebody."

- That picture moved over the AP wire

about three o'clock in the afternoon,

well ahead of time to be put on page one.

I took it to the Preliminary Page One Conference,

where we had all the editors

to make sure it wouldn't get lost later on

because it was a sensational picture.

There was discussion about whether

it tilted the balance one way or the other.

I was determined that we would play it on page one.

I saw it as a photograph that would shock the public

into an awareness of the cruelty of the war in Vietnam.

Eddie was very unhappy

about the publication of that picture,

even though it won him a Pulitzer Prize.

The victim had been caught in a very brutal act

and Eddie Adams tended to sympathize

with the Saigon Police Chief,

whose motives did not become clear

just from the publication of that picture

and I gave him great credit as a journalist

for me being able to see both sides.

- General Luan, then he was like a Colonel.

The whole thing is that the picture destroyed his life

and that's what bothers me more than anything else.

He never blamed me for the picture.

He used the cliché that we hear all the time.

"Eddie, you were doing your job and I was doing mine."

- Eddie did not like to talk to me about that picture.

We had been friends.

I had offered him a job on the New York Times.

The publication of that picture

marked the ending of our friendship in a funny way.

- I found two American Soldiers searching for souvenirs

from a dead North Vietnamese soldier.

He could have only been 18, 19 years of age.

They were very gingerly creeping closer and closer to him,

fearing booby trap, a booby trapped body, you see.

And when they finished what I thought was looting

and kind of marring his possessions which were few,

I was disgusted with their actions

and the most damming thing that, that they did

was to call him a dead gook.

Now it really, truly was terrible.

This is a man who sacrificed his life for his country,

whatever the political motives of Ho Chi Minh,

which would have been many,

this man was an innocent young man fighting

for nationalist kind of reunification.

So they went away and I was,

I was hateful of them and yet I was part of them, see?

I was kitted out as an American Marine.

I was sharing their food, sharing their uniform,

sharing their daily lives

and when they went away,

they trampled on all his possessions.

There were pictures of his mother, sister, whoever,

some little children,

some little snapshots of seated children.

I felt this man, he deserves protecting,

he deserves a voice so I shoveled all his stuff together

and I photographed it.

That's the only contrived picture I have taken in a war.

There is no need to contrive war pictures.

Things happen very fast.

People die in front of you.

People scream in front of you.

People claw at you to help them,

so there is no need to go around

doing the still life on the battlefield.

I can do that in my shed in the back,

but that's the only time, truthfully, I've ever done that

and many people ask me about the photograph.

I have no shame in saying, "Yes, I did it.

"I did it for this man.

"He couldn't speak. I spoke for him."

- I've known Don McCullin for a long time,

maybe 30 years.

Don saw more and all it's savagery.

He no longer wants to cover war for good reason.

He's seen too much.

I think Don covered 11 different wars.

He had covered wars in Asia and in Africa

and in Lebanon and in Northern Ireland

and in 1968, during the Tet offensive in Vietnam,

I was able to publish a full page of pictures

in the Daily New York Times by Don McCullin.

On October 15,

the first moratorium against the war

turned out huge crowds in cities all across the nation.

Thousands gathered in Chicago, New York, Boston,

San Francisco and Ann Arbor,

New Haven and many other cities.

- The photography from the Vietnam War

had a very powerful effect on my nation

and on me personally.

Our military and political leaders were telling us one thing

and photographers were telling us another

and I believed the photographers

and so did millions of other people

and I think it fueled the anti-war movement

and not only documented history,

but helped change the course of history.

- One of the landmark changes

came when Life Magazine devoted one issue

to publishing pictures of every soldier

who had died in Vietnam that week,

just hundreds of faces.

The publication of such pictures,

as Eddie Adams,

the picture of by Nick Ut of a naked girl running away

from a Napalm bomb.

The picture of a girl bending over the body

of a student who had been shot by the National Guard

at Kent State University.

These were important in turning public sentiment

against the war.

- The student demonstration

was the same as last year, except now the signs read,

"Nixon" instead of "Johnson."

In June, the President tried to meet the issue

when he ordered a partial troop withdrawal.

Four thousand Londoner's defying British support

for US action in Vietnam.

Paris students protest US policies in Vietnam.

- There are six cities in my life.

I grew up in Chicago and I love Chicago.

I have worked in New York more than anywhere

and a bit in Washington and LA

and London,

but Paris is my town.

In 1983, I had gotten an assignment

to be the Paris Correspondent for National Geographic.

We found a wonderful apartment

on top of one of these buildings

on Quai De Bourbon looking out.

So this is my first residential view of Paris.

I still love it.

I have been married three times

and I have been a widower three times.

A lot of men have been married three times,

but not too many have been a widower three times

and I had about 20 good years with each of the three.

I know so many widows who just don't have

the courage to fall in love.

They just feel that out of respect to their loved ones,

they have to you know live alone and live lonely lives

and I have been through that three times

and Pat has only really lost one husband,

but she was with him for sixty years,

but it took her a long time to realize

that, she too, could live again

and as a result we are living just wonderful new lives

at now 95 and 86,

so most people just don't have the courage

to fall in love again.

I retired from the National Geographic in 1989

and began writing a book

called "Get The Picture"

and when I finished that,

people were interested in the subject

and somehow I seem to be even more busy

than I ever was before.

People keep asking me to recollect the past.

People keep asking me to teach workshops,

to advise young photographers.

I have been writing articles for Vanity Affair

and The Frontline Club in London

and I am just having a ball working still.

- John is over 90 now.

He has had the most incredible career.

Despite the odds, he has covered and edited and been there

from before D-day to right now.

He's really so involved,

whether he is actually professionally involved

in taking photos or editing right now

or just being involved in,

in the stories of our time

and you can't do that if you are a cynic

or if you are a pessimist

or if you are tired or if you are bored

or if you don't have passion or commitment.

So I think somebody of his august age

is a great example to all of us.

- Until 11th September, 2001

it was fashionable to say that

the golden age of photojournalism,

the age in which I lived was dead.

If that is so, I would say that photojournalism

is now being re-born in challenging new forms

around the world.

9/11 was an enormous challenge to photojournalists.

One actually died in the building.

His film was found on his body.

Peter Turnley and Jim Nachtwey

managed to get there that very night

and lived right through it.

- On the morning of 9/11, with the first images that I saw,

I just had this sense there was no question,

this is who I am, this is what I do,

I have to go to New York.

I got to the outskirts of Manhattan.

I pulled up to a police barricade

and I had a press pass from Nato,

from covering the war in Kosovo

and I rolled down the window and I showed this press pass,

the policeman said, "NATO?"

and called over his friend and said, "Ralp!"

And Ralph came over and he said,

"This guy's with NATO, what do we do with him?"

The guy says, "Jesus Christ, they're here already?

"Well, just let him through but be careful."

New York City Police Department declared

a four mile periphery around Ground Zero,

the largest crime scene in the history of the United States

and all journalists have been evacuated.

I was used to being resourceful

from having gotten in and out of difficult places

around the world throughout my career.

I got up on the first floor of a building

adjacent to Ground Zero,

a place where Brookes Brothers was and is today

and I looked out at this scene.

It was now about 7, 7:30 at night.

I saw all these men and women, people that all had families,

bills to pay, their own concerns.

I saw them show up in the middle of the rubble

and difficulty and danger

and I saw so many people just arrive to do the right thing

and that blew me away and it's something that

that sort of sense of collective decency

has always stayed with me.

- We'll be here as long as you guys are here.

- If they stay, I could stay.

You gotta see these people,

like there is no such thing as having one hero anymore.

- While I wouldn't want to minimize the impact

and the traces that many of the things

that I and people like myself that do the work

that we do, see and feel,

I think something that's not intuitive often

is that in the midst

of war and conflict, human suffering,

that one often observes the most incredible gestures

of decency and honesty and goodness

by individuals

and that stays with me maybe longer.

- Most journalists are anti-war.

They damn well should be

because the war is pretty ugly when you get up close to it

and photographers, more than writing journalists,

have to get close to it.

- Anthony Lloyd, in his book,

speaks about the incident that happened at Chechnya

between Peter Juvenile and myself,

where he is screaming at us because we are photographing

these people who had just been hit by a rocket.

He said, "How can you do this?

"How can you just photograph these people?

"Don't you care?"

Peter and I turned on him and said,

"Well, frankly speaking, what the fuck are you doing here?

"If you are not here to cover this, then you should go home

"because this is what this is about.

"You are here to document what's going here.

"That's your job.

"Or you don't come."

It's not that you are a cold bastard,

it's because you have made a decision

that you want the world to see, what for example,

in this case, what the Russians were doing to these people.

They killed 300,000 people and got away with it.

- It really drives me when you see

good people being pushed around.

When you see people becoming the victims of violence

and then their lives destroyed.

- Quite frankly, I'm ashamed of all of it, really.

I mean, all of the things I have seen in my life,

all the blood, all the burnt children.

I am absolutely disgusted with the whole,

the whole business.

- War is inexcusable.

We're just children in the history of civilization

if we can't grow up and stop conflict.