Truth and Propaganda

JUNE 2024

By Charmaine Toh

Võ An Khánh, Mobile Military Medical Clinic during the Period when the Enemy is Defoliating U Minh Forest, ca. 1970, printed 2010. Inkjet print on paper, 23 3/5 x 15 3/4 inches. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore.

In December 2022, I was giving multiple tours of an exhibition, Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, at National Gallery Singapore. The exhibition had just opened, and, on all my tours, I would bring visitors to what I called the “war wall.” On it, I had displayed largely unknown works from North Vietnamese photographers Võ An Khánh, Lê Minh Trường and Lâm Tấn Tài, alongside the much better-known photographs of Eddie Adams, Henri Huet, Nick Ut and Don McCullin. I would then ask the group if they saw any difference between the two clusters of photographs, expecting a reply along the lines of how different the war looked from the other side, or how documentary modes of picture-making could vary so substantially. Instead, I had visitors suggesting that the Vietnamese work was “propaganda” as opposed to the press photography of Adams et al. Another interesting reply was that the Vietnamese photographs were made by amateur rather than professional photojournalists.

When researching for this exhibition, the “war wall” was an early idea. I had wanted a display that would expand our understanding of documentary photography and its association with truth and realism. Photographs of the Second Indochina War (probably more commonly known to Brooklyn Rail readers as the Vietnam War and to Vietnamese readers as the American War, differences which already point to the complexities of our terms of engagement) seemed to me the perfect illustration of the murky terrain of documentary work, photographic or otherwise. The established status of war photography as a subset of documentary supports our reading of such photographs as truthful and neutral depictions. This relationship is a result of how documentary photography has developed and circulated over the years and how these photographs have been instrumentalized within the press. However, what happens when prevailing aesthetics shift? What happens when documentary or war photographs no longer look like what we expect them to?

Clearly visitors could see a difference in vision between the two groups of photographs. But they interpreted the cluster that had been reproduced on various American media platforms as a more reliable source of information. Even the comment about amateurs versus professionals was linked to an assumption that professional photojournalists had a duty to depict the war in an unbiased manner, and therefore present a more truthful account, as opposed to amateurs who might present a biased point of view, or even worse, the propaganda of a communist government. In actual fact, all three Vietnamese photographers included in the exhibition were professional photojournalists. However, their photographs did not conform to the commonly understood modes of war photography, which privileged soldiers in action, the detritus of buildings, the suffering of victims, and so on.

Due to the limitations of space, I will focus on one photographer, Võ An Khánh (1936–2023), who had the most work on the war wall. Võ was born in the village of Ninh Quới in Hồng Dân District, Bạc Liêu Province, south-western Vietnam. During the 1960s and early 1970s, he traveled with a guerrilla unit of the North Vietnamese army to document the front line of the Vietnamese resistance against the Americans in the Cà Mau region. He managed the Photography Department of the local revolutionary cause and documented various events within the troop. I showed six photographs; none showed active fighting. Instead, the images featured the covert scouts, medics, musical ensembles and children who survived in the sheltering mangrove forests.

These black and white photographs are a haunting testimony of war and resilience, showing a different world compared to the images splashed across the newspapers and magazines in America at the time. Stylistically, they have a distinct language—moody, subdued and precarious. The two photographs of the mobile military medical clinic seem to show a constructed stage; the tight framing of the trees and the gauze screens create a distance from the viewer, unlike the immediacy and proximity of a screaming girl running towards the viewer, as in Ut’s The Terror of War (1972). The dreamlike beauty of the photographs belies its subject matter—people are also dying in these photographs. The visual treatment is at odds with the clear lines and sharp focus of press photography, an approach often used to highlight the untampered nature of a record of a scene.

One must remember that these photographs were made to be seen by people who were living within the war zone, not armchair viewers in homes a continent away. There was no need to tell viewers that a war was going on; they knew it on a visceral level. The photographs instead reflect on daily life and were made to reinforce a country’s spirit and strength in enduring a difficult time. To document is always to do so from a specific point of view. My failure to convey this via the war wall is a stark reminder of the continuing power of the prevailing discourse that associates documentary with truth.