A struggle to contextualize photographic images: American print media and the “Burning Monk”

On June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc sat in a lotus position in the middle of a busy Saigon intersection and set fire to himself. His self‐immolation was caught in an award‐winning series of photographs by Malcolm Browne. The “Burning Monk”; photographs — now recognized as some of the most powerful visual images to have come out of this period of history — became a frame through which many Americans perceived the events unfolding in South Vietnam during the Summer and Fall of 1963. This essay suggests that although these visual images engaged the American audience, their meaning — and thus the frame they provided — was the subject of a dispute within the American print media. How this frame was constructed depended largely upon whether the images were situated against a backdrop of religious oppression, or a war for freedom against the communists.

Key concepts:

• visual rhetoric
• photography
• media
• Vietnam
• Buddhists
• foreign policy