Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side

A stunning compilation of 160 never-before-published images by North Vietnamese photographers capture the events of the Vietnam War from a dramatic new perspective and document daily life and battle on the North Vietnamese side.

The groundbreaking publication Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side is an intense collection of images, many never seen before, from the cameras of North Vietnamese photographers. Each included photographer has a chapter highlighting his personal stories and captivating pictures. The stories are riveting and sometimes ironic: one revolutionary photographer falsified identification cards for Communist fighters, another traveled side by side with guerrillas, while another barely escaped a bombing campaign only to be forever haunted by the loss of his film and equipment.

With almost no resources, a serious lack of film, and outdated equipment, these committed photographers used will and determination in order to record history. From film processed under a night sky with homemade chemicals to making one roll of film last for years, each individual tale is a testament to the power of perseverance. Some of the pictures are haunting (a devastated landscape with the intense flare of napalm, an emergency surgery in a mangrove swamp), while others capture a seemingly staged Communist resolve (smiling soldiers with little children, classic hero poses shot from below). This book offers an important pictorial viewpoint and fills in many gaps from the popular Western media coverage of the war. --J.P. Cohen

Few aspects of the American war in Vietnam have escaped close inspection in this country. So it is startling to see a large, coffee-table book filled with 180 black and white images of that war that have never before been published on these shores. Taken by North Vietnamese photographers, the pictures are a mixture of staged, unabashed propaganda ("I wanted my pictures to be a weapon," says photographer Mai Nam, a longtime Vietnamese Communist Party member) and evocative insights into the way the war appeared from the other side, as when National Liberation Front political leader Ut Mot is shown in an austere underground bunker, light streaming in from a tiny skylight, looking pensive and determined. Accomplished British journalist Page provides running commentary on the war, and the photographers' experiences and reminiscences, particularly those who worked with the Vietcong guerrillas in the South. The book lives up to its billing as a piece of work that will help Americans more fully understand the nation's longest and most controversial overseas war. However, the many photos of smiling North Vietnamese and Vietcong and of captured, wounded and dead South Vietnamese and Americans surely will not warm the hearts of unreconstructed hawks. (Jan.)Forecast: An exhibit featuring more than 150 photos from the book will be held at New York City's International Center of Photography, January-March, and a documentary featuring Page's interviews will air on National Geographic Explorer on MSNBC in January. The book will appeal to the curious and the completist, but may not cross over to greater boomer-based sales.