“There was one photographer, actually a reporter who had a camera. Niven recovered thousands of images, many of which were still in negatives -never printed. Many of the surviving ones he interviewed didn't even know each other. Nine out of ten Vietnamese photographers were killed in the field, taken by bullets and bombs, while others succumbed to dysentery and malaria. He then worked through a large photographers association and eventually, by word of mouth, he came across photographers who served in the war. Niven started off with the official channels and the government news agency. So in the early 1990s, he started tracking down the surviving photographers. There were a few Vietnamese publications with pictures from the war, but not a single comprehensive attempt to put all the war images together. When photojournalist Doug Niven first went to Hanoi, he expected to see the war from the Vietnamese perspective, but to his surprise, there was not even a North Vietnamese book on the war. Many of these photographs are rarely seen, even in Vietnam. Others were self-taught civilians, many of whom anonymously sent their films to news agencies. They worked for the Vietnam News Agency, the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese Army or various newspapers. But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had hundreds of photographers of their own who worked in perilous conditions documenting every facet of the war. What the western world remembers about the Vietnam War is defined by a handful of iconic photographs taken through the lenses of American and other western photographers.
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