This 2007 photo shows Hong Kong-based photographer Hugh Van Es (left) chatting to fellow Vietnam War-era correspondent Peter Arnett during a gathering at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.

Dutch photographer Hugh Van Es, whose photo of the 1975 fall of Saigon became one of the most enduring images from the Vietnam war, has died. He was 67.

Van Es died on Friday, after suffering a brain haemorrhage last week in Hong Kong, where he had lived for many years.

His famous picture was often believed to show a helicopter evacuating people from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. In fact it was an apartment building that housed employees of the CIA.

“Like so many things about the Vietnam war, it’s not exactly what it seems,” he wrote in the New York Times in 2005.

Van Es was part of what became a famous generation of reporters and photographers who covered the Vietnam war, and many of those colleagues were quick to pay tribute to him on Friday.

“His sunny demeanour endeared him to his colleagues and to the American and Vietnamese soldiers he photographed,” Peter Arnett told AFP.

Arnett called him “one of the few Western photographers willing to take the risks of witnessing the war’s end.”

Source: AFP