“If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture” ~ Eddie Adams

Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan (above), chief of the South Vietnamese national police, firing his pistol into the head of a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, on a Saigon street during the Tet offensive on Feb. 1, 1968. (Eddie Adams/Associated Press)

PHOTOGRAPHER, ASSOCIATED PRESS

A combat photographer since the Korean War, Eddie Adams joined the Associated Press team in Vietnam in 1965. He became famous for his 1968 photograph of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of South Vietnam’s national police, shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head. Adams later regretted the picture’s notoriety, preferring to be remembered for his images of Vietnamese refugees after the war.

Adams’s time covering the war and the searing photograph above marks fifty years since the start of America’s first televised war and is symbolic of how dramatic stories authored by photojournalists and journalists brought news about the war to the rest of the world.