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	And what about this, also famous image?

	Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla 1968
	Photo Eddie Adams/AP
	•LIFE: “With North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive beginning, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s national police chief, was doing all he could to keep Viet Cong guerrillas from Saigon. As Loan executed a prisoner who was said to be a Viet Cong captain, AP photographer Eddie Adams opened the shutter. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for a picture that, as much as any, turned public opinion against the war.

	•NOT what Adams had intended:
	•he felt that many misinterpreted the scene as one of a horrific act with the implied villain the man shooting the other man in the head.
	•when told in 1998 that the immigrant Loan (the shooter) had died of cancer at his home in Burke, Va., he said, “The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.”

	•Interesting that interpreting imagery, including something as basic as understanding the role of captioning is not formally taught in any required course in college.
	•critical readers and not to believe everything we read, but it’s equally important not to look assume that images have obvious, unambiguous messages
	•Understanding this image draws on issues in photojournalism, the cognitive science area of understanding how we related text and images and how they can work best together, and again formal compositional issues—it’s not just a picture of someone being shot in the head, without judging content in any way, it also is an excellent composition.

	One could also look at the neurological issue of how process images of violence, pictures of faces, etc. New research shows different facial emotions are processed in different areas of the brain.