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He did the kind of work you'd expect from an AP veteran photographer. The tough pictures in unquestionably life-threatening combat conditions, the different-culture features. He helped establish the quality daily coverage that customers of the Associated Press expected to see from a war starring American `boys'. And then... according to virtually Everybody, he took what is often referred to as, `The Definitive War Photograph'.

So, was it Chance? Or simple, unrelenting, hard work which set the karmic confluence in motion years before? His skills, honed on thousands of newspaper stories, the technical reflexes so instinctive that making a `snap' flowed with the thought in virtual parallel, came together in a cosmic moment with the frustrated anger of a Vietnamese military officer, a captured enemy soldier, and the right mix of daylight, Tri-X and Fate.

THE photograph.

It is probably seared into your brain with the same undeniable force with which the bullet entered the head of the Viet Cong whose execution by pistol, by the rough 'justice' of conflict, Eddie captured on that frame of black and white film, on a street in Saigon, in 1968.

Eddie tried to stay emotionally unattached to that photograph over the years, aware of what it's fame allowed him, and took from him. He disliked talk of it, would walk away if pressed. Discussed it reluctantly, as if words could somehow diminish the power of the image, although no words ever have. (I think he eventually came to understand why that picture became the touchstone of a certain time in the history of the world. It was for most people as close as they would come, could come, to the dark heart of the brutal casual ferocity of war.)

He worked in more than a dozen wars and conflicts, but he did not like being called a war photographer. He was a people photographer. A young girl reaching high to touch tall, vividly yellow, backlit sunflowers her blind eyes will never see, or a small skiff on a small pond in the company of a bearded dictator out duck hunting. He took pictures of people. At their heroic best, at their life-ravaged worst.

He was almost hopelessly an American of his time, born between the intensely patriotic `World Wars', in 1933 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, of a normal father, mother, and sisters with whom he stayed close his entire life. He became a newspaper photographer, a flight controller in the US Marine Corps, (which lasted only until he talked the marines into transferring him to a combat photographer unit). Some battles are more costly than others. He became a divorced and distant father (he would admit sadly), a husband and father again in later years, and better this time. He became a world class `shooter', hobnobbing with kings and movie stars, models and Main St. Americans. There is a piece of old home movie film from his teens, delightful because it shows, for a brief moment when he is on camera, the thickest hair you would never see again on Eddie's head. (A black hat eventually took the place of thinning hair, and became an Adams style signature.)

Constant in photos of Eddie over the years is a look which defines 'sardonic', and somewhere in the frame, in his hand or dangling from his lip, will often be a cigarette of precariously improbable unfallen ash. He gave up smoking in the early 90's, yet with that abandonment I'm not sure he ever found an absolute comfort level again when relaxing. He was healthier certainly, but at the loss of an almost character defining appendage. He was a master of using smoke from a cigarette the way others used words or expression. You could sit at a table with him and the late afternoon contrasts of hard light and dark shadow would be stabbed by knives of smoke, or swirled with translucent white veils.

If you were stupid in act or word, or simply in his estimation of you at that moment, the smoke came out as dismissive as scorn. And he would turn his head away. For him in that moment, you ceased to exist. I watched him devastate sycophants with that gesture. I also saw him hurt people he cared about because the annoyance filter we use around people we love was thinner in Eddie. He grew up in an America at war, in conflict almost constantly, somewhere in the world. Every day was important, not to be wasted in idle word games. Say what you mean. Subtlety was used for humor. Anger or disagreement or irritation was right there on the surface. You knew where you were with him even when it was hurtful or uncomfortable.

He wanted perfection when working. No, the truth is he wanted telepathy. He was more angry then he wanted to be with simple frustrations. (The replacement rate of assistants was the stuff of legend.) Every word, or aside to an assistant was near agony to him when he was on a set, especially with subjects Presidential or Royal (either by dint of country or entertainment celebrity). He understood professionally the fact that time was the gold standard of his years of experience. Because he was good he got more time with those whose assistants mind their days in nervously PDA'd minutes. Because he was well known himself he often received their curiosity, and satisfying that curiosity with casually maintained conversation translated into time for the shoot. The world's famous, high tension subjects from high-visibility lives, lowered their barriers as Eddie jokingly, seemingly effortlessly, massaged their anxieties or conceits, relaxing both their schedules and faces. Eddie would shoot, and later the subject would recall only that Eddie had, 'been fun', or, 'was an interesting guy--not what I expected'. And the photograph would be Eddie Adams quality because he had earned it.

He covered local news in his early 'dues paying' years. He got it, got the significance of the local story, not just the need for it. That it impacted the lives of real people on a one-person-at-a-time level. I think he instinctively understood that an individual's story could also tell a nation's story. (He disliked the term, `photojournalist', thought it a laughable pretension.) Eddie would make a photograph not quite like anyone else's. He would not simply show you helplessness and horror, he could somehow put the fear of it inside you, so you understood it, would be forced to react to it. Or he could touch you with beauty, or humor, or the unexpected point of view. (Who else would turn Clint Eastwood's face away from the camera? He trusted his instincts, trusted the viewer to recognize, not even a profile, but a back! And in doing so, created one of the greatest movie posters for, 'Unforgiven')

Look at his work. Especially those pictures of the socially insignificant, the politically oppressed, the weak too often ignored by the strong and healthy. The frightened innocent in a world of warriors. How can you not want to fix this?, his photos demand. And he would be dismissive of this ability if you praised him. But I know he found his satisfaction in the recognition this is what he did well. This is how he earned his place on the planet.