SUNNYVALE, Calif. (AP) — Hal Buell, who led The Associated Press’ photo operations from the darkroom era into the age of digital photography over a four-decade career with the news organization that included 12 Pulitzer Prizes and some of the defining images of the Vietnam War, has died. He was 92.
Hal Buell, who led The Associated Press’ photo operations from the darkroom era into the age of digital photography over a four-decade career with the news organization that included 12 Pulitzer Prizes and some of the defining images of the Vietnam War, has died. He was 92.
Buell died Monday in Sunnyvale, California, after battling pneumonia, his daughter Barbara Buell said in an email. His final two months were spent with her and her husband, and he died in their home with his daughter at his side.
« He was a great father, friend, mentor, and driver of important transitions in visual media during his long AP career, » Barbara Buell said. “When asked by the numerous doctors, PT, and medical personnel he met over the last six months what he had done during his working life, he always said the same thing: ‘I had the greatest job in the whole world.’”
Colleagues described Buell as a visionary who encouraged photographers to try new ways of covering hard news. As the editor in charge of AP’s photo operations from the late 1960s to the 1990s, he supervised a staff that won a dozen Pulitzers on his watch and he worked in 33 countries, with legendary AP photographers including Eddie Adams, Horst Faas and Nick Ut.
“Hal pushed us an extra step,” Adams said in an internal AP newsletter at the time of Buell’s retirement in 1997. “The AP had always been cautious, or seemed to be, about covering hard news. But that was the very thing Buell encouraged. »
Buell made the crucial decision in 1972 to run Ut’s photo of a naked young girl fleeing her burning village after napalm was dropped on it by South Vietnamese Air Force aircraft. The image of Kim Phuc became one of the most haunting images of the Vietnam War and came to define for many all that was misguided about the war.
