Vietnam photographer Billhardt about his pictures May 2, 2017 – Posted in: Blog

Thomas Billhardt is the most famous GDR photographer of the Vietnam War. On Tuesday he becomes 80 years old. In our audio photo gallery, he comments on some of his photos.

Anyone who meets Thomas Billhardt is sure that this man will not be able to put his photo album so quickly out of his hand. Though no one could blame him. After all, the well-known GDR photojournalist, who lives in Kleinmachnow (Potsdam-Mittelmark), will be on Tuesday 8th.

Billhardt had studied photography from his mother, owner of a photoatelier, and then, from 1954 onwards, had reluctantly studied at the Fachschule für Angewandte Kunst in Magdeburg. Already with much greater enthusiasm, he graduated from 1959 to 1963 at the Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Art in Leipzig, graduating as a Diplom-Fotografiker / Fotodesigner.

Shortly before his anniversary the photographer has published his life memories as a book. For more than 60 years, Billhardt has traveled around the world – with a blue GDR passport until 1989 – with his camera. He has visited 49 countries in all these years. He experienced the revolutionary Cuba in the early 1960s, traveled through the Soviet Union in the times of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, or pressed the trigger on meetings with politicians, such as Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, or personalities like the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. He also lent the legendary brother kiss between Honecker and Brezhnev.

All this, according to the reader, is entirely due to coincidence, for Billhardt thinks in 1961 on the return flight from Cuba at an intermediate stop in Canada to stay in the West. But under the influence of the revolutionary mood in Cuba, he decides for the GDR. An attitude which gave him a thanking of the party and the state.

After the construction of the Wall, he continues to experience both parts of Berlin. He is also a cinematographer of the legendary Rolling Stones in the Westberlin Forest Theater in 1965, researched by the documentary duo Heynowski and Scheumann undercover in the vicinity of a US base in Rhineland-Palatinate, and is an eye-catcher of the NPD federal election campaign Year 1969. The recordings which the photo-reporter gets during the Vietnam War have particularly impressed the collective memory. Especially a photo, on which a couple fell in love hand-hand under palms, the machine guns on the back, ready to fight. This picture made him world famous.

By Werner Geske, Source