Eddie Adams (June 12, 1933 – September 19, 2004) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American photographer noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and as a photojournalist having covered 13 wars. He is the subject of a 2009 documentary feature, An Unlikely Weapon, directed by Susan Morgan Cooper.

Combat photographer

Adams served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War as a combat photographer. One of his assignments was to photograph the entire Demilitarized Zone from end to end immediately following the war. This took him over a month to complete.

Pulitzer Prize winning photograph

thumb|200px|Adams' photograph of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém on February 1, 1968
It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyễn Văn Lém, on a Saigon street, on February 1, 1968, during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive.

Adams won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a World Press Photo award for the photograph (captioned 'General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon'), but would later lament its notoriety.

On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in Time:

Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to Loan's honor while he was alive. When Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a "hero" of a "just cause".

He once said, "I would have rather been known more for the series of photographs I shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to Thailand in a 30-foot boat, only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines." The photographs, and accompanying reports, helped persuade then President Jimmy Carter to grant the nearly 200,000 Vietnamese boat people asylum. He won the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club in 1977 for these series of photographs in his photo essay, "The Boat of No Smiles" (Published by AP) . Adams remarked, "It did some good and nobody got hurt."

Awards

Along with the Pulitzer, Adams also received over 500 awards, including the George Polk Award for News Photography in 1968, 1977 and 1978, and numerous awards from World Press Photo, NPPA, Sigma Delta Chi, Overseas Press Club, and many other organizations.

Adams' legacy is continued through Barnstorm: The Eddie Adams Workshop, the photography workshop he started in 1988.
Adams died in New York City from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Eddie Adams Photographic Archive

The photographic archive of renowned photojournalist Eddie Adams has been donated by his widow, Alyssa Adams, to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin. The archive documents Adams's career and includes "Saigon Execution," his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. Measuring 200 linear feet in size, the includes slides, negatives, prints, audio and video materials, news stories, diaries, notes and tear sheets. In addition to substantive coverage of the Vietnam War, the collection includes his in-depth features on poverty in America, the homeless, Mother Teresa, Brazil, alternative society, anti-war demonstrations, and riots. The collection also includes his intimate portraits of such high-profile figures as Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Clint Eastwood, Bette Davis, Bill Cosby, and Jerry Lewis. The Adams collection joins the archives of a number of his colleagues already held at the Briscoe Center, including David Hume Kennerly, Dirck Halstead, Wally McNamee, Diana Walker, Dick Swanson, Flip Schulke, and Cynthia Johnson.