Larry Burrows

Larry Burrows (1926-1971) was born in London. At sixteen he started working as a darkroom technician in the photo lab of Life's London office. He did many different jobs, mainly drying films and running errands for famous wartime photographers, including Robert Capa, whose films he processed. His own photographic career started around 1945 when he photographed celebrities such as Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill for Life. Although Burrows photographed many stories - tribal fighting in the Congo (1960), the war between India and China on the Himalayan frontier (1962), the Olympic Games (1964), birds of paradise in Indonesia (1965) and the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia (1970) - his name will always be associated with the Vietnam war. Burrows first went to Vietnam in 1962, in the earliest days of American involvement. It was the first war he had ever covered, the sort of assignment he had been longing to do. His first big Vietnam story was published in Life in January 1963. It immediately established him as a master of Vietnam reportage. He covered the war for another nine years. On February 10, 1971 he was killed near the border with Laos when the helicopter that he and fellow journalists were flying in was shot down by the North Vietnamese. Burrows' photographs have been published widely, most notably in the books Larry Burrows Compassionate Photographer, by the Editors of Life, and Larry Burrows' Vietnam, which won the 2002 Prix Nadar as the Best Photography book of the year.