Nhìn lại cuộc chiến Việt Nam

Với gương mặt khắc khổ, giọng nói từ tốn, ông McCullin kể lại cảm xúc và những nỗi bất an của mình qua một số bức ảnh tiêu biểu ông đã chụp tại cuộc chiến Việt Nam từ năm 1965 đến 1973 khi còn là phóng viên ảnh chiến trường cho tờ The Illustrated London News.
"Tôi đã chụp những bức ảnh mà có lẽ bây giờ sẽ không ai cho phép chụp nữa".
Đó là những bức ảnh đầy biểu cảm về sự tàn khốc của chiến tranh Việt Nam cho tất cả các bên: lính Mỹ và đồng minh, Việt Nam Cộng Hòa, Bắc Việt, và những người dân thường bị kẹt giữa nhiều làn đạn.
"Cuộc chiến tại Việt Nam là một cuộc chiến hết sức phức tạp. Nó không chỉ đơn thuần là cuộc chiến giữa miền Bắc và miền Nam Việt Nam, mà còn là Chiến Tranh Lạnh, chiến tranh ý thức hệ, và còn có thể là cuộc chiến giành độc lập nữa"
Tuy có trong tay thẻ báo chí do chính phủ Việt Nam Cộng Hòa cấp, nhưng Don McCullin đã chọn không chỉ thể hiện cái nhìn của quân đội Mỹ và Việt Nam Cộng Hòa qua ống kính của mình.
Sự tự do báo chí ông có được trong những năm 60 được ví như một 'tờ ngân phiếu trắng', cho phép ông được toàn quyền tự do chụp ảnh, được sử dụng cả trực thăng khi cần thiết để đi đến những vùng giao tranh nguy hiểm và nóng bỏng nhất.
Ông đã tận dụng cơ hội đó để chụp những bức ảnh mà ông cho là đại diện cho ba điều: bản thân ông, tờ báo London News, và tính nhân văn.

BBC

Còm của Gấu Cà Chớn:
Tại sao lũ Ngụy lại ngu đến như thế, nhỉ?
Cho phép tay này 1 "ngân phiếu trắng"?
Mất nước là đúng quá rồi!

Kinh nghiệm riêng của GCC:
Đám Ngụy rất quí nhà báo, chứ không hẳn là sợ. GCC, có trong túi cái thẻ ký giả nhật báo Tiền Tuyến dởm, do PLP cấp riêng cho, chỉ để đêm đêm ghé thăm Cô Bạn, ở mãi tít bên Chợ Lớn, khi về lỡ bữa nào quá giờ giới nghiêm, bèn móc bóp giơ thẻ ra 1 phát, là anh lính nào cũng "nể ra mặt", xê ra cho Người đi làm phóng sự chiến trường!

Don McCullin parle du moment fugitif où s'établit le rapport avec son sujet, l'instant du "oui". Ce moment d'intimité nue, lorsque lui ou elle le voit et lui pardonne, au seuil de la mort, de la famine, d'un chagrin inconsolable, quand leur enfant git mort sur le sol de l'entrée, tué par une bombe lors de l'attaque : quand même "oui.
Qui, prenez-moi. Qui, prenez-nous.
Qui, montrez au monde ma souffrance."

McCullin is talking about the elusive moment of connection with his subject - the "yes", the moment of naked affinity where he or she sees him, and forgives him, at death's edge, starving, inconsolably bereaved, when their own child lies dead on the hall floor, bombed in the attack: still "yes. Yes, take me. Yes, take us.
Yes, show the world my pain."
John Le Carré 

John Le Carré dans la préface de Au coeur des ténèbres, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1980.
John Le Carré from the preface of Heart's of Darkness, Martin, Seeker & Warburg. London, 1980.

Don McCullin  nói về khoảnh khắc lẩn trốn, khi, chủ và khách là một, khoảnh khắc thân quen xuồng xã, khi anh ta, hay cô ta nhìn thấy anh và tha thứ cho anh, ở bực thềm của cái chết, của cái đói, của cái đau thương không làm sao an ủi được, khi đứa con của họ nằm chết trên mặt đất, ngay lối vào, do bom nổ trong cuộc tấn công: thì vẫn là tiếng
“yes,
Hãy chụp tôi đi. Hãy chụp chúng tôi. Hãy chỉ cho thế giới nỗi đau của tôi.” (1)
John Le Carré: Trong lời Tựa cho cuốn Trái Tim Của Bóng Đen, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1980.

(1)

Cái từ "ma", “my” trong "ma souffrance", "my pain", quá thần sầu. Câu tưởng đơn giản, mà kinh khủng quá.
Đây là cái ý mà Steiner đã từng nói tới: Vào thời “You Tube”, thì độc giả, kẻ chụp hình, khán giả...  cũng là đồng phạm với tên sát nhân.
Eddie Adams, tay Mẽo chụp hình tướng Loan giết VC cũng nói như vậy: Loan giết VC bằng khẩu súng, tôi giết Loan bằng tấm hình.

Theo từ điển trên mạng :
• ELUSIVE (adjective)
 The adjective ELUSIVE has 3 senses:
1. difficult to describe
2. skillful at eluding capture
3. be difficult to detect or grasp by the mind
Familiarity information: ELUSIVE used as an adjective is uncommon.
K dịch một cách trần trụi là " khó tả" . Elusive moment of connection : một khoảnh khắc đồng cảm khó tả , một giây phút cảm thông không diễn thành lời .
Mấy người viết văn thường lãng mạn hóa những tình huống rất thông thường . Những nạn nhân chiến tranh ấy biết làm gì khác hơn là lặng yên khi họ sống dưới sự khống chế của các bên ? K nghĩ mấy ông ấy chỉ biện hộ cho những tấm hình đó thôi hà .

Tks all.
NQT

 

Bà mẹ 24 tuổi và đứa con, Biafra, Nigeria, 1969

DON McCULLIN'S IMPOSSIBLE PEACE

Between photographing the construction of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1961 and his work on the ravages of AIDS in southern Africa in 2001, Don McCullin has never ceased observing the suffering of others through the major conflicts of four decades. It is a look filled with anger, sadness, and even despair at the unspeakable cruelty man inflicts on his fellow creatures. A gaze charged with disbelief, compassion, and solidarity with the weakest, the destitute, the outcast, and victims of unacceptable circumstance.
Cyprus divided, Congo lacerated, Vietnam bombarded, the Middle East torn, Biafra starving, Bangladesh ravaged, Cambodia murdered, Salvador in uprising, Northern Ireland in revolt, Iraq tortured, Darfur razed.
Neither voyeur, nor hunter, nor really a historian, Don McCullin, self-taught as a photographer and as a reader of the world, is a man with a worn face but a clear and innocent eye, incredulous in the face of barbarism. Through his striking photographs published regularly for twenty years in the prestigious British supplement, The Sunday Times Magazine, he devoted himself to disturbing the weekend comfort of his compatriots by showing them man's injustice to man across the planet. In his pictures, there is something of both Zola and Goya. At the same time, he declares his own guilt by recognizing that his images are powerless to change the course of events ... just as he could not prevent the death of his father when he was fourteen or, later, of those close to him.+

Trong những bức hình của ông có điều gì của cả hai Zola và Goya. Cùng lúc, ông nói về tội của riêng ông, khi nhìn nhận, những hình ảnh của ông thì vô dụng, chẳng  làm sao thay đổi được dòng sự kiện.

Don McCullin's most celebrated image is his portrait of a dazed American soldier, entitled Shellshocked US Marine, Hue, Vietnam. It was taken during the battle for the city of Hue in 1968 and, in its stillness and quiet intensity, says as much about the effects of war on the individual psyche as many of McCullin's more graphic depictions of conflict and carnage. The eyes that stare out beneath the grimy helmet are not staring at the camera lens, but beyond it, into nowhere.

 Surprisingly, when I ask McCullin about the photograph, which features in this retrospective of his reportage in Manchester, he grimaces. "It kind of gets on my nerves now," he says, "because it has appeared everywhere. It's like the Eddie Adams shot of the execution of a Vietnamese prisoner."

Now 64, and married for the third time, McCullin lives and works in rural Somerset. These days, he concentrates on landscape photography and has just completed what he says will be his last book, the epic Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire. "It brings me a kind of peace," he says, "until I hear the local hunters shooting. Gunfire is a prelude to war for me. I feel I'm back there on some godforsaken road passing dying soldiers lying in culverts."

There is a sense when talking to McCullin that he carries a great burden of loss and regret. He has, he says, seen too much in his lifetime and it has left its mark on him. He is recognised as our greatest living war photographer, though he bridles at the term. "Whatever I do, I have this name as a war photographer," he says, ruefully. "I reject the term. It's reductive. I can't be written off just as a war photographer."

This extraordinary exhibition will do nothing to help his cause. Alongside his photographs of conflicts in Cyprus, the Belgian Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon and beyond, many of which have not been seen before, it features contact sheets and magazine spreads from his halcyon days at the Sunday Times magazine in the early 1970s. There is also a wealth of personal material: his passports, his army boots and helmet as well as his many cameras, one of which, a beloved Nikon F, was fractured by a sniper's bullet in a rice field Cambodia in 1970 just as he held it up to his face.

In Vietnam, McCullin lived among the American soldiers, many of whom, he says, thought him mad. "They kept offering me guns for my protection and, to their utter astonishment, I kept refusing. A gun has no place in a ¬photographer's kit. You are there as an objective observer." He tells me that many of his contemporaries did carry guns, though. "Dana Stone and Sean Flynn [son of the Hollywood actor, Errol Flynn] were straight out of Easy Rider, riding around on motorcycles carrying pearl-handled pistols. Cowboys, really. I think they did more harm than good to our profession."

Both Stone and Flynn, along with McCullin's friend Gilles Caron, were killed in Cambodia in 1970/71, having been captured by the Khmer Rouge. "They were held in a jungle clearing and then put to death in the most appalling way," he says quietly. Another friend, the great Japanese photographer Kyoichi Sawada, was also captured there but somehow talked his way free. He, too, was killed later. I ask McCullin if he feels like one of the lucky ones. "I guess so. I signed up for a job where you have no guarantees. Why should you? War is war, war means death. If you go and come back, you are lucky."

It was Sawada who photographed McCullin as he lay wounded in a field hospital in Phnom Penh in 1970, having been hit by fragments of a mortar shell. McCullin says he was most afraid, though, when he was captured by Idi Amin's soldiers in Uganda and held prisoner for four days. "They dug pits outside our cell. The sense that something awful was going to happen was constant and almost overwhelming."

Closer to home, McCullin created some of the most memorable images of the early Troubles. During a riot in Derry, he was blinded by CS gas and recovered in a dingy house that reminded him of his working-class upbringing in Finsbury Park in north London. "I was caught between the two sides, with the Provos warning me off one day and the British army chasing me the next." His images from there are often surreal: a well-dressed young man nonchalantly carrying a wrapped parcel past a soldier who is taking aim at rioters; a woman taken aback in her hallway as soldiers in riot gear rush down her street like samurai. "Oh, that was just a gratuitous piece of luck on my part," he says, smiling. "That woman in the doorway, she makes the picture, really."

I ask him if, even in the chaos of conflict, he thought about formal composition. "Always. Somewhere in your head, you think about how the image will appear later. You have to. You want people to see it and be impressed." He singles out his great photograph of an American soldier hurling a grenade. "I was as much a target for the snipers as he was, but I got the shot that I saw in my head."

McCullin famously prints his own photographs. Has he ever developed a print and been shocked by the result. "The albino boy," he says, without hesitation, referring to his heartbreaking image of a starving Biafran child clutching an empty corned beef tin. "The day I came across that boy was a killer day for me. There were 800 dying children in that schoolhouse. The boy is near death. He is trying to support himself. And to see this kind of pathetic photographer appear with a Nikon around his neck …"

He falls silent again for a moment. "Some times it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It's as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed."

At the Imperial War Museum, McCullin's vivid and sometimes shocking testimony is war reportage as it used to be. He would not, he says, want to be a young war photographer in Iraq or Afghanistan. "No way. I mean, the idea of agreeing to be embedded? No. It's an absolute tragedy. We spent years photographing dying soldiers in Vietnam and they are not going to have that anymore. I understand that, but you have to bear witness. You cannot just look away."