(May 21, 2005) – Legendary photojournalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Horst Faas, 72, retired last year from the Associated Press in London after a five-decade career as one of the world’s leading war photographers, has been hospitalized in Bangkok, Thailand, and is paralyzed from the chest down.
Faas was stricken in Hanoi on May 4 shortly after the war reunion and while he was getting ready to present one of his photography clinics with associate Tim Page and other photojournalists, reports his long-time friend Richard Pyle of the Associated Press, who was with Faas and other journalists in Vietnam for the 30th anniversary of the end of the war. Pyle says Faas was taken to a Hanoi emergency clinic where doctors at first thought he might be suffering from a heart problem, but it was later discovered that he had a blood clot on his spine.
Through the AP's Denis D. Gray in Bangkok, Faas sent an eMail message to News Photographer this morning from his bed in the Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok:
"Since my arrival in Bangkok I have had an operation of the spine and the cause of my paralysis – which was a burst blood vessel inside the spine and consequent coagulation – was removed. The coagulated blood had pressed on the nervous system of the spinal cord and caused paralysis from the chest down.
"I feel much stronger now and I am being treated with extensive and long physical exercise. There is hope that the feeling and the command over my limbs may return in a matter of months. I will be transferred to a special rehabilitation center in Bavaria within a week. I plan to get myself equipped with computers in Bavaria and continue to work on various book and exhibition projects under way. I've been in good spirits from the beginning and I realized that only positive feelings and optimism will bring me through these months."
Faas celebrated his 72nd birthday in Saigon on April 27.
“I had been worried about Horst because he seemed to be having trouble walking,” Pyle told News Photographer today from his AP office in New York City. Pyle, who had been AP’s Saigon bureau chief during the war, and Faas, an AP photographer who covered Vietnam from very early in the conflict, are long-time friends as well as being co-authors of the book Lost Over Laos (Da Capo Press, 2003). Pyle said that Faas and many other photojournalists had been in Saigon for the war reunion before Faas flew to Hanoi to put on a workshop for Vietnamese photographers. Pyle said he and others in the group were on a tour in Saigon and when they returned to the hotel there was an urgent message from the AP bureau in Hanoi telling them to call immediately. When they did, they learned that Faas had been taken to an emergency clinic.
Krista Kennell, assistant managing editor of ZUMA Press, was also there. "Horst was taken from our hotel in Hanoi, the De Syloia, to a clinic. I had just got to know him that weekend," she said. "He's such an amazing guy, and told great stories. On the night of his birthday they had a big Vanity Fair photo shoot on the roof of the hotel, and then there were drinks and a few stories. I was so impressed with his openness and his humor. The day of the memorial, they were all outside and it was hot and they were running around in the heat. Maybe it was too much. On the day I shot his portrait (above) he was having trouble walking and standing. In fact, I had him sit down. When he got sick and they took him from the hotel, that night they flew him to Bangkok."
Pyle said that the Associated Press arranged for the aircraft, which was staffed with medical personnel, to evacuate Faas to the Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, for advanced treatment and care. Bumrungrad is Southeast Asia’s largest private hospital and the first hospital in Asia to be certified by the U.S.-based Joint Commission on International Accreditation, according to the hospital’s Web site, treating 275,000 patients annually from 150 nations. At Bumrungrad, Faas was treated by an Australian doctor who discovered the blood clot problem and he was taken into surgery to drain the blood from his spinal column, Pyle said. But the paralysis remained after surgery.
Today's eMail from Faas to News Photographer is the first update on his condition since an eMail that Pyle got from Gray on May 13 in which he said Faas was "in good spirits" and that recently the photojournalist showed some slight movement in a toe, which was taken as a good sign. Pyle said that in the message “Horst says through Denis, ‘Thank you for your continued good wishes. My return to Europe remains completely open and depends on my ability to be transported.’” The photojournalist’s wife, Ursula, flew from London to Bangkok last week to be with Faas, Pyle said today.
Faas was born in Berlin in 1933 and his photographic career began in 1951 with the Keystone Agency. He covered the Indochina peace negotiations in Geneva in 1954. He’s been with the AP since 1956 covering wars in the Congo, Algeria, Vietnam, and Laos. He was AP’s chief photographer for Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1974 based in Saigon, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for his portfolio of photographs from Vietnam, then again in 1972 for his coverage of the conflict in Bangladesh. He’s a winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club, and until his retirement from AP last year he was a senior editor based in their London bureau.
In addition to his own accomplishments as a photojournalist, Faas is the picture editor who pulled what he later called "The Perfect Newspicture" from a roll of the late Eddie Adams's film in Saigon on February 1, 1968. "The Saigon Execution," Faas wrote in The Digital Journalist, was "the perfectly framed and exposed 'frozen moment' of an event which I felt instantly would become representative of the brutality of the Vietnam War." Faas is also the picture editor who transmitted Nick Ut's famous "Napalm Girl" photograph of severely burned Kim Phuc in 1972, moving it on the AP photo network after another editor had refused to send it because of the graphic content.
