Henri Huet, 'Most Influential' Vietnam War Photojournalist, Finally Honored

You might not know his name, but you've seen his work. Haunting images of men up to their waists in mud, wading through South East Asian jungles. Maybe you've seen the series of medic Thomas Cole, himself bloodied and half-blinded, covered in a sagging, once-white bandage, tending to men strewn about a makeshift hospital, a clearing really, filled with the dead, the dying, the wounded.

Forty years ago today, four photojournalists died when they were shot down over the Laos sky: Larry Burrows of Life magazine, Kent Potter of United Press International, Keizaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek and the man behind those images described above – Henri Huet – a French national just shy of 44 years old, and an Associated Press photographer who devoted more than 20 years to covering Vietnam.

On Tuesday, an exhibit opened in Paris at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie – "Henri Huet: Vietnam." It is a first, honoring the man, the work, and the time. His colleagues, killed that day, are represented as well. Co-curated by the Associated Press, and the Huet family, the effort to bring Huet's name back to prominence was largely the work of his niece, Hélène Gédouin, an editor at Hachette in France.

James Caccavo, who worked as a photojournalist first for the Red Cross and then for Newsweek in Vietnam, met Huet in the field and recalled his work was aesthetially outstanding, but said " they also had a very strong human element, a lot of emotion in them. He was one of the few photographers who got the names of people in his pictures. He always had all this information when he filed so you will see the names of those he photographed. He personalized the work he was doing." Caccavo arrived young and relatively green, 23, in 1968. But Huet treated him as a peer. "He was very warm and friendly. He was very kind. There was no big ego."

Huet was born in 1927 in Da Lat, Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and a French father. He moved to France as a toddler and grew up to study painting. But by 22 he was back in Vietnam as a French combat photographer, eventually joining the Associated Press. He won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his work in 1967.

"I had heard from him as a child because my father used to tell stories about their childhood and about Henri's work," Gédouin told me in an e-mail. "My father admired him, this spirit of adventure." But she really didn't know his work until she came across Requiem a book of photographs taken by photojournalists who perished during Vietnam. It was published by one of Huet's editors, a German AP reporter and editor named Horst Faas. "That was a real shock. I realized how good Henri was as a photographer, and how compassionate his work was. I decided I wanted to know more, and this is how it all started."

This was an exhibition that Gédouin put together first in Perpignan, the small southern French city. And then, a book she worked on with Faas and the AP -- Henri Huet - "J'étais photographe de guerre au Viêtnam." And what became a multi-year effort to teach her country about the work of one of their native sons; a man whose name had been all but totally forgotten. "As he worked for the Associated Press and because the archives are in New York, his work was not well known in France," she said.

"I respected Henri as a person, as a reporter of great integrity, great fairness ... and of course he was a good photographer, a photographer who had a little bit of extra as an artist," Faas, his old boss, said at the Perpignan festival. "He was the most influential photographer of his time, in Vietnam."

When Gédouin began to think about honoring her uncle, she says, "I phoned AP Paris. The Paris photo editor, Guy Kopelowicz, answered my call. He was very surprised, as he had met Henri. He told me that he had always wanted to do something for Henri before to get retired. He was thinking of an exhibition. I said, 'And you never thought of a book?' He said, 'Non, but it seems that you just fell from the sky' . . . then gave me Horst Faas' contact in London.

"I phoned him. I will never forget the strong voice with a German accent who said: 'Well, when do you come to London?' I was there within 10 days. I saw the material and there was enough to make a good book. When I came back to Paris, it took me less than a month to find a publisher. Then Horst and I flew to Stockholm to meet Henri's fiancée: she had kept all Henri's belongings."

Gedouin continued researching, writing and editing in a process she calls "very moving, and very painful." In 2006 she brought the work to Jean-François Leroy, the man in charge of the annual Visa Pour L'image festival in Perpignan, who agreed to show his work. But she didn't want to stop there. "I wanted to get Henri's photos to Paris," she said. So she made an appointment with Jean Luc Monterosso, director of La Maison Européenne de la Photographie. "Monterosso looked at the photos and said 'yes' at once. He gave me his first possibility and it was February 2011.

"I only realized that it would be the exact 40th anniversary of Henri's death when I started to get in a real schedule of work with the museum six months ago."

The timing has made Huet's old colleagues nostalgic.

"He was very warm and very kind," Caccavo, the photojournalist, says again and again in a conversation. "When he and Larry [Burrows] and [Kent] Potter were killed on that helicopter it was a devastating shock to all of us. All of these people were gone at once. I was in Los Angeles when it happened. I came back to the U.S. to finish up and get my degree. I heard the news on the radio and as soon as I got home I went to call the AP to see who was on the helicopter ... I was devastated. There was no way they could survive that kind of incident. It took many, many years before they were even able to get to the crash site and find what they could find."

Caccavo says Huet lived the war so deeply, he never even took the opportunities afforded him to leave.

"I remember when Henri left Vietnam to work for the AP in Tokyo. I saw him in Tokyo in 1970 and he desperately wanted to get back to the war. He took my wife and me to dinner and he was talking about how he missed the closeness of being with people because you do get very close to people in the field, and he was very determined to get back even though it was very dangerous. I don't think it was a thrill-seeking or ... sense of adventure. I think it was the human experience of being close to people again. We were like a big extended family."

Gedouin says the opening of the exhibit this week was large and well attended. "The thing I am always a bit sad about is that Henri's children are not here to celebrate the work of their father. Henri's brothers and sister have been looking for them and didn't manage to find them. When Henri got divorced, the children stayed with their mother who traveled to settle in Australia. Since then, nothing . . . "

Maybe now they'll hear of him, and now they will know. Their father is an icon of war photography, a man whose work informs and shapes all that has come since.

The exhibition runs through April.