Romano Cagnoni part 2

August 6, 2009

MF: The photographs you took of Ho Chi Minh were the first taken by a westerner during the Vietnam War. Do you consider that a coup? It certainly seemed like it. How did you make that happen?

RC: Since the fall of the French army at Dien Bien Phu, the western media had tried unsuccessfully to enter North Vietnam. The distinguished journalist James Cameron, television cameramen Malcom Aird and myself were the first non-communist correspondents to obtain an entry-visa in November 1965. Photography was under heavy censorship. Simon Guttman – the man who started Robert Capa in photography – for many years contributor to Picture Post and with whom I had worked together for a number of years in London, providing stories for different English magazine and papers, was the man able to get such a sought-after visa. Indeed, it was a scoop, Life Magazine made a cover of my Ho Chi Minh picture and many world top magazines bought the story. It was fascinating to meet a legendary man like Ho Chi Minh; at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi. He refused to be photographed. I said to the President that people in the west sensitive to justice would have loved to see him in such a good health. He told me that I was an optimist, that optimists make good revolutionaries and that I could photograph him.

Ho Chi Minh and Phan Van Dong, Hanoi, 1965

MF: You’ve covered more than your fair share of armed conflict in your career, yet I remember you saying once that your interests were not those of a war photographer.

RC: The definitions of what kind of photography one is interested in reminds me of an interview between a Life Magazine editor and a young photographer: “Well, do you look at Life?’ “Oh yes,” replied the young photographer, “every day I walk the streets hoping to photograph something significant! Death is significant. Absurdity, love, loneliness and so on are significant. Cartier-Bresson once said, “All photographers have my solidarity, but absolutely none with ‘aestheticians’ who pose ‘belle jeunes filles en fleur’. Another photographer much closer to my generation who defined his work interestingly is Abbas, a friend, who said, “The photojournalist sees beyond himself, not inside himself, and in doing so he is not a prisoner of reality – he transcends it”……. Is there a creative photojournalist? Or a fine art photographer? Wedding photographer? Advertising? Fashion? Is it not enough just to be a photographer? Like painter, sculptor, architect, writer, builder, carpenter. War is a fascinating, terrible situation. As a child I ran away with my family the day before the Nazis murdered all the villagers on the mountains in Tuscany, in the village where we were refugees to escape the allied bombings. In photographing conflicts I always had the tendency to take the side of the poor.

Biafra, 1968

MF: While we’re on the subject, in two of your war stories you took different-from-expected approaches. I’m thinking of Chechnya and Croatia.

RC: The Chechnya photographs were the first time a photographer set up a studio on the front line. The idea came from my wife Patti. We departed from our Tuscan house loaded with flashlights, tripods and reflectors. We reached Grozny where a few badly armed Chechens were resisting the powerful Russian army and air force. These warriors were a race of people about whom writers like Tolstoy, Lermentov, Pushkin had written enticing stories. Patti and I, fascinated by such men, set up a studio in Grozny during the fighting.