Black and white war, now in living color
Posted: Friday, July 25, 2008 3:22 PM by Daily Nightly Editor
By Marisa Buchanan, NBC News producer
There is a picture on my refrigerator at home – it’s small, with a regular looking guy lying on a bunk bed reading a book. It’s nondescript, but I love this picture not just because it's a picture of one of my two grandfathers whose memory I cherish.
My paternal grandfather ended up an Air Force Colonel later in life but in Korea was a reconnaissance squadron maintenance officer after flying p38's in WW2. This picture joins others I have of him from the Korean War framed on my desk at NBC. They always felt cool to have -- retro -- but destined to always feel removed from any real life I could imagine. They are in black and white. Thus it struck me slack-jawed last month when I saw long-time NBC foreign correspondent John Rich's color collection of Korean war photographs at his Maine home.
As you'll see in the Nightly News piece tonight there are hundreds and hundreds of them: marines, pilots, generals, children and refugees in bright vivid color. They practically lift off the page; the colors are so crisp.
Suddenly a war that for the most part we only knew in shades of grey and white has lush green hills, red blood, bright blue sky, canary yellow trucks, and children wearing pink! The collection reveals a distant world suddenly familiar in colors that bring even wartime General MacArthur back to life.
An honored war correspondent with the truck to prove it, Rich covered every major armed conflict from Korea to the Congo for nearly 30 years at NBC News, never taking a single photograph of any other war he covered.
It was a fluke that he took so many pictures during the three years of Korea, which was his first war as a journalist after being a marine in World War II. It was a fluke that he did it with color film when every war photographer Rich knew shot, as a rule, in black and white.
I think he would agree with me when I say there was no bigger fluke then when I found him again at the ripe age of 90 years old. After coming across some of his reporting in the NBC archives I got distracted with curiosity and, as Brian Williams would say, " got a case of the Googles. " (Mr. Rich, we need to get you listed on the former NBC correspondents wikipedia page!)
Since then it has been an honor and a delight to welcome Mr. Rich back into the NBC family. "Our man in Tokyo!" as Tom Brokaw said recently, himself a cub reporter towards the end of Rich's career. John Rich had a foreign correspondent's career right out of central casting.
In doing this story with another fearless correspondent -- Mike Taibbi -- we both learned a few things along the way about how television news worked as a new medium in the early 50's. We included some of that in a fascinating video blog. With a video blog online, Rich has now conquered more platforms in more decades than anyone else at NBC News.
I came home last night and looked at that black and white picture on my fridge of my grandfather in Korea. I stared at it a long time, as I had with all Rich's color photographs while preparing the Nightly News piece. I noticed things for the first time in those shades of grey and white. There are pictures pinned to the wall behind him – it’s his family and my dad among them, as a little boy.
There is a calendar taped to the wall there as well. I could just make out the date at the top. It reads "March 1952." I took it off the fridge and flipped the photograph over. In ink is written, " I set the camera up and run jumped in sack before the timer went off." I turned it to the front again and I swear I think Grandpa Buck winked at me. It took hundreds of photographs in color to show me a black and white one in greater detail. It’s another time and another place -- but it finally feels real to me.
More of John Rich's photo collection: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25851741/displaymode/1107/s/2/
