On the June morning in 1950 when war broke out in Korea, John Rich was ensconced in what he calls a "correspondents villa" in coastal Japan, anticipating a long soak in a wooden tub with steam curling off the surface and a fire underneath. Rich's editor at the International News Service had other plans. "Get your fanny back to Tokyo!" he bellowed over the phone. Days later, the 32-year-old reporter was on a landing ship loaded with artillery and bound for Pusan, Korea.
Along with notebooks and summer clothes, Rich carried some Kodachrome film and his new camera, a keepsake from a recent field trip to a Japanese lens factory led by the Life magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan. Rich, who was fluent in Japanese after a World War II stint as an interpreter with the Marines, had tagged along to translate. "It was a little company called Nikon," he recalls.
Over the next three years, between filing stories for the wire service and, later, radio and television dispatches for NBC News, Rich snapped close to 1,000 color photographs of wartime Korea. The pictures were meant to be souvenirs, nothing more. "I'd walk around and bang, bang, bang," says Rich, now 91, with hair like dandelion fluff. "If something looked good, I'd shoot away." He photographed from helicopters, on foot and from the rickety jeep he says he bartered for "four bottles of rotgut whiskey." He photographed prisoners of war on Geoje Island and British gunners preparing to fire on occupied Seoul. And he searched out scenes from ordinary life, capturing Korean children at play and women pounding laundry in a river. With color only a click away, Rich was drawn to radiant subjects: in his photographs, little girls wear yellow and fuchsia; purple eggplants gleam in the marketplace; guns spew orange flame.
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