Thomas Billhardt with his photos in the television tower of Berlin.
Photo: dpa/Annette Riedl
He would have received a Pulitzer Prize-if he hadn’t lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain: Thomas Billhardt. He reaches iconic photos that went around the world and not only mobilized the solidarity movement with the Vietnamese people who were fighting independently in the so -called Eastern Bloc. For example, that of the petite young Vietnamese, who, with a carabiner held, performs a large, strong US pilot that was shot down by the liberation fighters. “The giant in the rice field” headed Billhardt the photo, which was of incredible courage and confessed confidence in David’s victory against Goliath. The even more in the contemplative Billhardt photo of the Vietnamese lovers, hand in hand, rifle is still shouldered, but is liberatingly walking, anticipated.
Another photography from the Vietnam War shows a grandmother who matters her five -year -old grandson in a corpse hall. “I had to capture this shattering scene,” said Billhardt in the “ND” interview. “This pain, this misfortune, this crime has to experience the world. I was responsible. And suddenly I got very hard. And cried. ”The war reporter, who did not understand himself as such, continued:“ I spoke to the grandmother, she did not react, she was completely gone in her grief. While I slowly pulled the boy to myself and she was whimpering behind, I talked down to her comfortably: ›Grandmother, I promise you, all the world will see your suffering.‹ Of course she didn’t understand me. After I had my photos, I assured her again: ‘I did that for you and your grandson.’ It would have been unforgivable if I hadn’t made this misfortune public. ”
Thomas Billhardt, born in Chemnitz in 1937, was fascinated by photography from the past. No wonder, since his parents were the owner of a well -known photo studio in Chemnitz. With his mother, a trendy portrait photographer, he learned the craft. He then studied at the technical school for applied art in Magdeburg and initially worked as a company photographer in the brown coal mine. Soon the talented photographer traveled with the legendary DEFA documentary filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann to Southeast Asia. He remembered the two gratefully, whose school was hard but all the more successful.
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Even before the turn, he was on the road for Unicef. He was always interested in the poorest, weakest and most defenseless creatures on earth. He felt and suffered with them, he wanted to show her pain. “I never just wanted to show a destroyed house, rubble or grenade funnel, but take pictures that are keen on. Not only the camera holding and snapping, but capturing symbols, arousing outrage, creating compassion and promoting solidarity. ”His photos were exhibited worldwide, in Moscow and New York, Paris and London, Florence and Beirut, Prague, Kiev and Kraków, in Santiago de Chile and Valparaiso … and of course in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
But his photos from everyday real socialist life are also unique, touching, such as the squeak -intensified grinds in the sauna of a kindergarten. Billhardt also unintentionally provided the template for the kitschy motif for Berlin-Souvenirs of all kinds: the “brother kiss” between Honecker and Breshnew. To photograph political prominence, however, was not his ambition.
Thomas Billhardt, who died on January 23, is to be mentioned in a breath with the greats of press photography: from John Heartfield and Robert Capa to the Pulitzer award winners Nick út, who flee the photo of the naked Vietnamese girl from Son fleeing Napalm My Mach, and Kevin Carter, who surrounded a Sudanese girl, who died of hungry, had immortalized as relentless charges by A Asgeier.
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