A Day with Tony Vaccaro

Erin Faith Allen with Tony Vaccaro, December 2019. © Erin Faith Allen

I have always wanted to be a war correspondent. Not just in the abstract but in the body, the way certain wishes live permanently below the surface. I am a fourth generation photographer, descended from people who shared my obsession with the lens and the image, including many great and great-great grandparents who were professional photographers from the moment the camera was invented. Photography runs in my blood in the most literal sense. So when I found myself sitting in Tony Vaccaro's home one afternoon in December 2019, I understood exactly what I was in the presence of: a living example of everything I am, and have ever wanted to be.

Tony Vaccaro served as a private and scout with the 83rd Infantry Division, fighting his way from Normandy through Belgium, Luxembourg, and into Germany. Army regulations prohibited soldiers from taking photographs unless they were with the Signal Corps. Tony ignored this. He carried a small 35mm Argus C3 camera he had bought as a teenager alongside his M-1 rifle, and over 272 days of combat he shot thousands of images from closer to the action than any authorized photographer on record. At night he developed his film in helmets borrowed from fellow soldiers, hung the negatives on tree branches to dry, and carried them forward with him the next morning.

What he documented became history. What he did with the rest of his life became something else entirely. He went on to become one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, working with Kennedy, Picasso, Sophia Loren, Georgia O'Keeffe, and so many others whose names you already know. His eye was shaped in the sharpness of combat and it never lost the ability to find the essential human truth in a single frame.

This week (December 2019) I spent a day at his home in New York. He was generous with his memories in the way that only certain people are, the ones who have decided that what they witnessed belongs to the world. He told me details about his war and his photographs and he told me what it felt like to move through that much death with a camera.

What stayed with me most was his dedication to conviction forged in the specific futility of what he had experienced through the front lines. Tony Vaccaro knew what war costs because he had paid it himself, frame by frame, body by body, across the entire length of his days at Europe while a world was at war. From his experiences he carries a deep pleading for humanity to choose differently, and the grief of someone who knows that is less than likely.

To spend a day in the presence of a man who literally created and documented while the world was blowing up around him was truly beyond inspirational to me.

For a fourth generation photographer who has always wished she could time-travel as a combat photojournalist, spending a day in the presence of this man was a true dream.

He answered every question that I asked, and I soaked up every answer.