Vertical histories
How we shoot and watch video is changing, and with it the way we engage with the world
The two iconic images of the fall of Kabul involve a C-17 taking off from Hamid Karzai Airport. It’s as searing as the helicopter perched atop an apartment complex in Saigon, a stream of Vietnamese climbing the ladder to the roof in the hope of getting aboard.
In Kabul, 46 years later, we have something similar, but now the photographer is not a UPI photographer called Hubert Van Es, back at the office developing film:
If you looked north from the office balcony, toward the cathedral, about four blocks from us, on the corner of Tu Do and Gia Long, you could see a building called the Pittman Apartments, where we knew the C.I.A. station chief and many of his officers lived. Several weeks earlier the roof of the elevator shaft had been reinforced with steel plate so that it would be able to take the weight of a helicopter. A makeshift wooden ladder now ran from the lower roof to the top of the shaft. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, while I was working in the darkroom, I suddenly heard Bert Okuley shout, “Van Es, get out here, there’s a chopper on that roof!”
I grabbed my camera and the longest lens left in the office — it was only 300 millimeters, but it would have to do — and dashed to the balcony. Looking at the Pittman Apartments, I could see 20 or 30…
