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ON THE JUNE MORNING in 1950
when war broke out in Korea, John Rich
was ensconced in what he calls a "corre-
spondents villa" in coastal Japan, antici-
pating a long soak in a wooden tub with
steam curling off the surface and a fire
underneath. Rich's editor at the Interna -
N„ i tional News Service had other plans.
1 ` "Get your fanny back to Tokyo!" he
t • " l \ ' . t` e / - bellowed over the phone. Days later, the
.,....
. . " a ; `4 '" 32- year -old reporter was on a landing ship
, ' ,, , loaded with artillery and bound for
'� " ' t Pusan, Korea.
A b' , , , Along with notebooks and summer
- ; clothes, Rich carried some Kodachrome
, .
r ". * - �' « film and his new camera, a keepsake from
l a recent field trip to aJapanese lens facto-
r «* j ry led by the Life magazine photographer
s r, i "t+ ' , , , David Douglas Duncan. Rich, who was
fl
+ fluent in Japanese after a World War II
t .stint as an interpreter with the Marines,
° f 1 had tagged along to translate. "It was a lit
V I , t company c all e d Nikon he recalls
1 . ' Y r l ` '' Over the next three years, between
'..,. f stories for the wire service and,
I later, radio and television dispatches for
w _,,.._ i NEC News, Rich snapped close to 1,000 i
=" - -- '""""'•••**- °' color photographs of wartime Korea. The
` pictures were meant to be souvenirs,
1' nothing more. "I'd walk around and bang, 1
bang, bang," says Rich, now 9i, with hair
. - ., like dandelion fluff. "If something looked
'► •
.
'" * "I never thought anything
l ap " " would come of them,"
• - e * John Rich says of the some
, 1,000 personal photographs
-::.•.
(left: children in Seoul in the
winter of 1950 -1951) that he
i .
made as a reporter during the
I I war (below: in Seoul c. 1951).
t , i
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WAR , ilook,„..i „,... . ,
1.1 .....
NOVEMBER 2008 SMITHSONIAN 63
yr
good, I'd shoot away." He photographed
from helicopters, on foot and from the
11 rickety jeep he says he bartered for
"four bottles of rotgut whiskey." He
f ' photographed prisoners of war on
Geoje Island and British gunners
preparing to fire on occupied Seoul.
And he searched out scenes from ordi-
nary life, capturing Korean children at
play and women pounding laundry in a 3 ~
river. With color only a click away, Rich t .`
was drawn to radiant subjects: in his
photographs, little girls wear yellow and 1 ,
P>g g
fuchsia; purple eggplants gleam in the r f
marketplace;
ns s ew orange fl
P g
e ame.
E He had no idea then that the pic- , :� a • 1
tures would constitute perhaps the / •
most extensive collection of color pho-
tographs of the Korean War. Though dA • ```� ' - r`
Kodachrome had been around since the . +.R kt . / -` " ,, ,.z
mid- i93os, World War II had slowed its = � � ;i �.�, +rs„
L i spread, and photographers continued to �
favor black-and-white for its greater
technical flexibility, not to mention -, -.`
marketability —the major periodicals -*
had yet to publish in color. Duncan, -
Carl Mydans and other famous photo- ._
journalists working in Korea still used ' k ` : I r . -
i
black-and-white film almost exclusively.
1
Rich bought film whenever he was
on leave in Japan, and he sent pictures
out for processing, but he barely ,
glanced at the developed transparen-
w
cies, which he tucked away for safe
keeping. Rich's Nikon was stolen after ,-4- " _ —" '°" c
the war, and he largely gave up taking
photographs.
Then, about a decade ago, Rich, long
retired to his birthplace of Cape Eliza-
beth, Maine, mentioned to a neighbor
that he had color slides from the com- '" ,,
bat years in his attic in a Japanese tea
chest. The neighbor, a photographer r
and Korean War buff, almost toppled .r
over. Rich understood why when he g ,
started reviewing the pictures. The r,
"Forgotten War" came back to him in a ' -.4. •.
rush of emerald rice paddies and cy- ,
clones of gray smoke. "Those white .
hills, that blue, blue sea," he says. "I lay
awake at night, reliving the war."
A few of the pictures surfaced in
ABIGAIL TUCKER, the magazines staff
writer, last reported on the salmon crisis.
4 > See more of John Rich's Korea pictures at Smithsonian.com/korea
"She was really showing a lot
of leg!" Rich recalls of the
actress Betty Hutton's USO
J performance (left). His
1 pictures also conjure up the
wreckage of war (far left: a
Korean boy on the remains of
- a Russian plane). The then-
4 44 .• new Kodachrome film Rich
used created intense reds, I
and some critics would later
debate whether bloodshed
should be documented in
: 07..,,,,L. color. Rich himself rarely
4, t
r photographed the dead
(below left: two bodies of
I Chinese soldiers south of
�, Seoul in 1951). Below: While
f 1 n *, �, touring the Far East, U.S.
r r ' . - J Secretary of Defense Louis
p' '`s Johnson (in white) and Gen.
) Omar Bradley (at right)
it °' ' t ' "'"'�� r 'e' ' attended a military review
it 4 y` E
r'" • 1 ; in Tokyo with Gen. Douglas
1
7 4711;4
MacArthur (center)
. on June 19, 1950, days before
. North Korea invaded South
Korea and started the war.
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NOVEMBER 2008 SMITHSONIAN 65
i
Rich's local newspaper, the Portland
r
Press Herald, and in a South Korean - °' - --_
paper after Rich visited the country in
the late 199os. And they were featured - - "
this past summer in "The Korean War ____„,,--
in Living Color: Photographs and Rec-
ollections of a Reporter," an exhibition
at the Korean Embassy m Washington,
D.C. These pages mark their debut in a
national publication.
The photographs have claimed a
unique place in war photography, from '
the blurry daguerreotypes of the Mexi-
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can- American War to Vietnam, when
color images became more common-
place, to the digital works now coming
out of the Middle East. Once a history --.
.. ter.•, >
confined to black-and-white suddenly - ,ems• ° , ,F
.iii► .•�•• . -- '
materializes in color, it's always a bit *�
startling, says Fred Ritchin, a New York /" 06 University photography professor who , � +
studies conflict images: "When you see ® ' ' 'L 1 '""
4 . : ;, "
it in color you do a double take. Color - _ ' -- _:
makes it contemporary" t ' Y' ■
Rich, who covered the Korean War' C`
in its entirety, remembers two colors the mon , `--s _
most: the Windex blue of the ocean and -
sky, and the brown of sandbags, dusty _ f., , k j w Ailo
roads and fields of ginseng. In his pho '' ' _ k- _ ook 3 tographs, though, red seems the most /� p ` i‘
° vivid. It's the shade of Bet Hutton' ,- - `
i
_ : -
V pumps as she danced for the troops, and t3 s ' 1 � .
the diamonds on the argyle socks of the r f � - - t:,.. ` ? f dr '• `s 7 ;
3
Scottish regiment that marched to bag- ' ;
66 SMITHSONIAN NOVEMBER 2008
------
--
pipes squealing "Highland Laddie" (a
memory Rich invariably relates with lib -
eral rolling of r's). Photographers, in fact,
long revered Kodachrome for its vibrant
crimsons and garnets. And yet, during
Vietnam, these reds also led some crit-
ics to argue that war should not be pho-
tographed in color. "We hadn't seen the
injured in red before," says Anne Tucker,
IIP curator of photography at Houston's
4
Museum of Fine Arts, which is planning
�� an exhibition of war images. To be sure,
,. • Rich's collection does not dwell on
L"' 5 1 . " ' _ ' death, though it includes a picture taken
,4,„„:' - ' - = ...�._ • - ' `.+ d p"� - .� . r.
z - , south of Seoul in the spring of i95i of
z
°-� u - ' _ , . - 7 r _:_ . '" two fallen Chinese soldiers and a scarlet
„ , , ... { �; r s8 50 ' 0 i „" splash on the ground.
� 1 t Wearing pressed charcoal pants and
\ 1 , '�` ' house slippers, Rich shuffles industrious-
- .-.., »- �" , , �,,, n , ..
" ∎ `'" ly around his seaside cottage, where even
at a the windowsills are stacked with figurines
,---f= ' i > - and carvings collected during a reporter's
I k 1 II ,„ 1 VI "''' h ' ' ` well- traveled life. Working mostly for
( � - NBC News, he covered Vietnam and ill
I if m ' i any of the major conflicts of the aoth
r ;_ .t, - " century— including, remarkably, the first
-... 'Mc ',„, i t, . �-. i / ` "` ,, Gulf War, when he was in his 7os and
` ,- -, i " ' � - " armed with shaky credentials from a
. ,, — , °--- _ , weekly newspaper in Maine. (He says he
:. '
. briefly contemplated shipping out to the
s "" latest Iraq conflict.) The son of a postman
•;' and a homemaker, he played tennis with
future Japanese Emperor Akihito, trav-
eled to China with Richard Nixon and
As heavily damaged Seoul lived beside barbed wire in a partitioned
(above) began to rebuild after Berlin. Three of his four children live in
the North Koreans fled in Asia (the other is a U.S. magistrate in
September 1950, residents Portland), and his wife, Doris Lee (whom
' tried to resume their daily he met in Korea and calls his "Seoul
lot
lives (right: a civilian with a mate "), is never far from his side.
walking stick and possible He has returned to his photographs
. Glauco-
opium pipe). Rich (above left: because his eyesight is oin
r .... going.
at home in Maine this past m a makes even reading the newspaper
Ir, ` ' August) only recently difficult and, especially when he wears
` j rediscovered his slides, the dark sunglasses he's prescribed,
- • x perhaps the largest collection dims the goldenrod bouncing outside
_ _ of color photographs from the his door.
`rt- conflict (left: marines outside Riffling through piles of prints, Rich
. - Pusan relax before battle). "I pulls out one of a South Korean soldier
k didn't know I was the only guy with pink flowers lashed to his helmet.
taking them for three years," "This is when spring came to Korea," he
says the retired reporter. explains. The bright blossoms don't
His lasting impression? "I look like camouflage: the young man
remember the beauty. Korea must have wanted to be seen. And now,
was a very beautiful country." finally, he is.
NOVEMBER 2008 SMITHSONIAN 67