FCC honours Willie Vicoy's memory with exhibition of his photos

Twenty-five years after he was fatally wounded in an ambush in the Philippines, Reuters photographer Willie Vicoy (photo), is being honoured by The Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong with an exhibition of his work.

Vicoy was already an internationally renowned news photographer when he joined Reuters in 1985 after working for 25 years for UPI. He began his working life as a messenger and once admitted that he virtually ran away from home in the Philippines to cover the Vietnam War because he feared his parents might prevent him leaving. He told them he was going to cover a routine assignment in the Philippines, and “before they knew it I was in Saigon”.

His most famous picture, of a Vietnamese woman carrying a blood-spattered child, achieved a unique distinction: it was used on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines in the same week. Ten years after the war, Vicoy - a father of six - said in an interview that he still had nightmares about it. “It is the dead children I photographed who come back to haunt me.”

He always said he preferred working for news agencies rather than newspapers. “I like the wires, you can cover both sides,” he once said. He was doing just that when he died.

Vicoy had been covering anti-insurgency operations in the northern Philippines. He was among an army-escorted press party which was ambushed by pro-communist guerrillas near Tuguegarao in Cagayan province, 210 miles from Manila, on 24 April 1986. Another photographer, Albert Garcia, said he and Vicoy heard gunfire and leapt from their jeep moments before it was hit by a rocket-launched grenade. Vicoy, struck by shrapnel, fell unconscious. He died in hospital the next day. A reporter for a Manila newspaper, Pete Mabazza, was also killed in the ambush, along with six soldiers. Garcia was wounded.

Sir Christopher Hogg, Reuters chairman at the time, said of Vicoy: “He was probably the most widely respected and admired news photographer in South East Asia. He was held in awe by fellow Filipino photographers...”

In 1987 the Willie Vicoy Reuters Fellowship for photojournalists was established to enable news photographers from the developing world to study at Missouri University’s School of Journalism. ■