Honoring a Life Lived Courageously

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/world/europe/26iht-letter26.html

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LONDON — As hallowed institutions of British life — the BBC above all, but also the police and prosecutors, and hospitals and schools that should care for young people — were being sullied by the spreading scandal around the always weird Jimmy Savile, it was a moment of clarity, and hope.

Scores of people, most of them from the media, were gathered in the “journalists’ church,” St. Bride’s, just off Fleet Street, to remember Horst Faas — a great journalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and legendary photo editor for The Associated Press and, though he probably would have thought this least of all, a great German.

Shafts of light shone down on our faces, and the ravages of age, multiplied by covering wars, drinking hard and smoking plenty, showed starkly. But that was not important; coming together to honor this man was.

The first reading was from “My Friend Horst” by the late David Halberstam, who called his friend a genius, “one of the three or four best people” he ever met.

Both Mr. Halberstam and Horst (this is how he was known; Mr. Faas just does not sound right) won Pulitzer Prizes in Vietnam, Mr. Halberstam in 1964 for written dispatches, Horst in 1965 for what the citation called “daring and courageous combat photography.” Horst won a second Pulitzer, together with Michel Laurent, in 1972 for pictures from Dacca, Bangladesh. Two of the most famous images from Vietnam — Eddie Adams’s 1968 picture of an execution at point-blank range in Saigon, and Nick Ut’s picture of a naked girl running from a napalm attack — were sent under Horst’s direction from The A.P. bureau in Saigon.

This was a man who survived a near-fatal injury while covering Vietnam in 1967, who saw with unusual clarity not just the picture to take, but how to live life to the full. Famous for his trenchant pronouncements in perfect but always German-accented English, he also listened uncommonly carefully, as is clear in the cadence of his written dispatches from Vietnam and his tireless later work to commemorate the many photographers — including North Vietnamese — who died covering the war.

Indeed, in the words of the first powerful hymn we sang: “Who so beset him round with dismal stories, do but themselves confound — his strength the more is. No foes shall stay his might, though he with giants fight: He will make good his right to be a pilgrim.”

Horst’s extraordinary pilgrimage began in Berlin, where he was born in April 1933, just after Hitler had come to power. With his father on the Eastern front, Horst was the man of his family as they fled the Russian advance in 1945, eventually settling in Munich.

In 1951, he joined the Keystone press agency, where he said he learned to recognize a good photograph because he had so many hundreds of thousands to sort. He joined The A.P. in Bonn in 1955, and after covering wars in Congo and Algeria was sent to Vietnam in 1962. He semi-hung up his cameras in London in 1976, when he became The A.P.’s renowned European photo editor until retiring in 2004. In Hanoi in 2005 for a Vietnam reunion, he suffered a spinal hemorrhage that left him a paraplegic — but still a determined traveler and master of sparkling phone talk.

This was the man we had gathered to remember in the London he loved so well that it was a picture of Horst — gray-haired, portly, but somehow always impish — on his bicycle at a London pub that greeted us at the service.

And, to the point about institutions, this was a British one at its best: a beautiful church designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672, words and hymns ancient and modern woven together by David Meara, archdeacon of London, and a magnificent organist and choir who electrified us with everything from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to the Bill Withers soul hit “Lean On Me,” topped off by a British ditty about photography that just had us erupting in unchurchlike applause.

Afterward, of course, we went round the corner to that other great British institution, the pub. Never mind that insight about the ravages of alcohol — only a real drink would do for Horst.

Some of his photographs were dotted around. One, taken Jan. 1, 1966, showed mothers and their children in a flooded trench, peering up in a sheer terror that crossed the decades. Horst imparted the secrets of war photography as he raised his “army” — the many A.P. photographers who followed him in capturing stunning images, in war and peace. That picture from the trench seemed to illustrate his mantra: “I know how not to be noticed, and how to get in the middle of things,” he told the Newseum. Yet, if you want to survive: “Don’t get involved, don’t get mixed up, don’t get between the groups.”

Horst learned that kind of survival — and clarity — early, in the ruins of Hitler’s Germany. Although he died in Munich, he spent most of his adult life outside Germany, and was arguably better known in America, in Britain and even in France, where photojournalism has a special place in the arts pantheon, than in his native land.

But as the choice of music (Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler) reflected, and as his superb administrative skill attested, he was a cultured, disciplined German. Always definite, but never — despite a reputation for sternness — dictatorial. And with great humor.

Once, in 1993, for the war in Bosnia, we had to order an extra-short flak jacket for a female A.P. reporter there. Horst oversaw such orders — “What does she think this is?” he barked, “Giorgio Armani?”

But Horst took the order. And, when he sent it, it came, of course, in a Giorgio Armani bag.