In August I enjoyed a great holiday trip to Vietnam with four people, two with digital cameras and two shooting analog (film). Vietnam is a great place for taking pictures. There are rivers everywhere, rice fields of incredible brilliant green, Mekong Delta, Sapa Mountains, Halong Bay (Unesco World Heritage), great portraits of people working, smiling, on boats, at the market, driving scooters (there are millions of scooters!), exercising alongside the lake in the center of Hanoi. But it was surprisingly a great place to enjoy photography.

At the "War Remnants Museum" in Ho Chi Minh City, there is an exhibit called "Requiem" that contains a collection of pictures taken by 134 war reporters killed or listed as missing between 1950 and 1975 in Vietnam and Indochina. It is really moving. They are from all nationalities. One picture shows three journalists just before boarding a helicopter that would be shot down soon after. Robert Capa died here as did Larry Burrows famous for many Life Magazine covers. And what about this picture?

This shrapnel pierced camera was that of a Japanese reporter, Taizo Ichinose. Unfortunately, all these great pictures are not available online. I think that they should publish them. At the entrance of the room, there is this epitaph: "Each came for a reason and died taking a chance. All lived for the next picture; it could be the best one of all. It is for their photographs, not their dying that the world remembers them."

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