Before Babylift: Female Photojournalists and Vietnamese-American ‘Orphans’ in American Print-media, 1971–1973

Abstract

President Ford’s announcement of ‘Operation Babylift’, a plan to airlift over 2,000 Vietnamese ‘orphans’ from South Vietnam to the United States in March 1975, prompted a wave of interest in adoption of Vietnamese children by American families. This was the culmination of years of growing interest in adopting Vietnamese ‘orphans’. Contemporary newspaper reports credited television and photographs with motivating potential adopters. Adding to scholarship which explores how photographs create discourses of ‘rescue’ and ‘responsibility’ in humanitarian contexts, this article examines how arguments for transnational adoption as a solution to Vietnam’s ‘orphan problem’ developed in the years leading up to Babylift. It notes stark differences in depictions of white-Amerasian and black-Amerasian children in keeping with racial discourses of early 1970s America. The work of female journalists in Vietnam has historically been marginalized; this article redresses this, arguing that American women photographers offered a specific perspective on the ‘orphan problem’.

KEYWORDS:

• Operation Babylift
• print media
• photography
• Vietnam War
• transnational adoption
• Amerasian

Data availability statement

The source base for this research was accessed via the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Database and the ProQuest News, Policy and Politics Magazine Archive. Access was provided by the Library of the University of Manchester.

The New York Times articles can be found online for free:

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/30/archives/another-way-the-us-has-left-its-mark-on-vietnam.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/07/archives/part-vietnamese-part-blackand-orphans.html

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted in the course of a PhD funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Georgia Vesma

Georgia Vesma is a current PhD candidate at the University of Manchester working on a project titled ‘Developing the Picture: Western Women Photographers in Vietnam, 1961–1975.’ Her research focuses on how women’s photography produced gendered meanings about the conflict, its participants and victims for western audiences and how women photographers ‘crossed the frame’ to become not only reporters but also the subject of news reporting themselves.