Sal Veder, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who shot iconic photograph of soldier getting back from Vietnam, dies at age 99

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Pulitzer Prize profitable photographer Slava ‘Sal’ Veder, finest recognized for his image of a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel joyfully reuniting together with his household after 5 years in a prisoner of struggle camp in Vietnam, died Aug. 22. He was 99.

Veder’s household on Wednesday confirmed that the retired Associated Press photojournalist died in his sleep, simply eight days shy of his a hundredth birthday, at his dwelling in El Dorado County, California, outdoors of Sacramento.

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The San Francisco Bay Area native was 46 years outdated in March 1973 when he was despatched to Travis Air Force Base for the arrival of Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm and different struggle prisoners getting back from Vietnam. Veder was in a crowded bullpen jockeying for photos with dozens of different photographers when out of the nook of his eye he noticed Stirm’s 4 youngsters start to gallop towards their father.

“You could tell, even at a distance, what they were feeling. It was all over them, their faces, the way they all broke into a run. There was a surge of emotion from the crowd, too,” Veder mentioned in a 2015 interview with The Guardian.

Using a makeshift darkroom arrange in a girls’s lavatory on base, Veder cranked out six pictures, together with “Burst of Joy,” which received the 1974 Pulitzer in characteristic pictures. Veder famous that within the {photograph}, Stirm has his again to the digital camera, rendering him an everyman soldier returning to the simple pleasure and pleasure on the faces of his youngsters.

The photograph turned an emblem of the tip of U.S. involvement within the Vietnam War. But for Stirm, it represented heartbreak as he had been handed a “Dear John” letter from his spouse, Loretta, by a chaplain upon his launch and the couple divorced a yr later. Stirm died in 2025.

Slava J. Veder was born Aug. 30, 1926, in Berkeley, California, to Ivan and Anka Veder, who had left Russia and brought the names John and Ann once they settled within the U.S. He was their solely little one.

He labored as a sports activities author and information editor at a number of publications and in 1961, he was employed as a employees photographer by The Associated Press at its Sacramento bureau. Later, he transferred to the San Francisco workplace, which is the place he was primarily based when he took the prize-winning {photograph}.

Friends and former colleagues remembered Veder as a heat and humble one who liked to ice skate and sail. He mentored youthful photographers and all the time took time to ask the folks round him how they had been doing that day.

“He was the first Pulitzer Prize winner I ever met, like holy smokes,” mentioned Brad Mangin, a contract sports activities photographer within the San Francisco Bay Area. “He was just the sweetest man.”

Eric Risberg, a retired AP photographer who labored in San Francisco, mentioned Veder was an amazing mentor and instructor.

“He really, really emphasized the marriage between pictures and words. He encouraged me to dive deeper, and get more into what’s really the story?” Risberg mentioned.

Among his many assignments, Veder took images of the late Ronald Reagan when he was California governor, college campus protests towards the struggle in Vietnam, the financial institution theft trial of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, and the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by disgruntled former metropolis supervisor Dan White in 1978.

Veder retired from AP in 1993.

Har, a former AP journalist, contributed reporting beforehand for this story. AP staffer Randy Herschaft contributed to this report.