SUNNYVALE, California — Hal Buell, who led The Associated Press’ photography operations from the darkroom era to the age of digital photography during a four-decade career at the news organization that earned 12 Pulitzer Prizes and produced some of the defining images of the Vietnam War , is deceased . He was 92.
Buell died Monday in Sunnyvale, California, where his daughter lived, after suffering from pneumonia, his daughter Barbara Buell said in an email.
“He was a great father, friend, mentor and driver of important transitions in visual media during his long AP career,” said his daughter. “When the many doctors, PT and medical staff he met over the past six months asked him what he had done during his working life, he always said the same thing: ‘I had the greatest job in the world.’ ”
Colleagues described Buell as a “visionary” who encouraged photographers to try new ways to cover hard news. As editor responsible for AP’s photography operations from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, he led a staff that won 12 Pulitzer Prizes under his leadership and worked in 33 countries, with legendary AP photographers such as Eddie Adams, Horst Faas and Nick Ut.
“Hal pushed us the extra mile,” Adams said in an internal AP newsletter at the time of Buell’s retirement in 1997. “The AP had always been, or seemed to be, cautious about covering hard news. But that was exactly what Buell encouraged.”
Buell made the crucial decision in 1972 to publish Ut’s photograph of a naked young girl fleeing her village after being set on fire by napalm dropped by South Vietnamese Air Force aircraft. The image of Kim Phuc became one of the most moving images of the Vietnam War and, for many, came to define everything that was misleading about the war.
After the image was sent from Saigon to AP headquarters in New York, Buell examined it closely and discussed it with other editors for about 10 minutes before deciding to run it, he recalled during a 2016 interview.
“We didn’t have any objections to the photo because it wasn’t itchy. Yes, nudity, but not itchy in any sense of the word,” Buell said. “It was the horror of war. It was the innocence that got caught in the crossfire, and it went right out, and of course it became an enduring icon of that war, of any war, of all wars.
Santiago Lyon, former vice president and director of photography at AP, called Buell “a giant in the field of news agency photojournalism.”
“A generous, warm and sympathetic man, who always made time for photographers,” Lyon said. “He will be missed.”
Buell joined The AP on a part-time basis in the Tokyo bureau after graduating from Northwestern University in 1954 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism. He was serving in the military at the time and worked for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
Two years later he left the Army and went to work at AP’s Chicago bureau as a radio writer, and a year later, in 1957, he was promoted to the photo desk in AP’s New York office.
Buell returned to Tokyo at the end of the decade as supervising photo editor for Asia and returned to New York in 1963 to become AP’s photo projects editor. In 1968 he became executive news photo editor and in 1977 was named assistant general manager for news photos.
During his decades at AP, technology in news photography has made astonishing leaps, from six hours to six minutes to take, process and transmit a color photo. Buell implemented the transition from a chemical darkroom where film was developed to digital transmission and digital news cameras. He also helped establish AP’s digital photo archive in 1997.
“In the 1980s, when we went from black and white to full color, we did a good job of sending two or three color photos a day. Now we’re sending 300,” Buell said in the 1997 AP newsletter.
After retiring in 1997, Buell wrote books on photography, including “From Hell to Hollywood: The Incredible Journey of AP Photographer Nick Ut;” ‘Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph That Captured America;’ and “The Kennedy Brothers: A Legacy in Photographs.” He was the author of more than a dozen other books, produced film documentaries for the History Channel and lectured across the United States.
Buell is survived by his daughter, Barbara Buell, and her husband, Thomas Radcliffe, as well as two grandchildren and a great-grandson. His wife, Angela, died in 2000, and his longtime partner, Claudia DiMartino, died in October.
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Associated Press writer Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida, and the AP Corporate Archives contributed to this report.