When American soldiers returned home from Vietnam, most put their memories away. Decades later, North Carolina veterans contributed thousands of dusty and faded personal photographs to what started as a class project at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem. It evolved into a national traveling exhibition and then a permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of History called “A Thousand Words: Photographs by Vietnam Veterans.” For many of these men and women, this was their first opportunity to show what they couldn’t say. Photographer and Vietnam-era vet Martin Tucker presents selected glimpses of those unforgettable experiences.
Martin Tucker is an award-winning photojournalist, documentary filmmaker and speaker. His work has been published via the Associated Press and in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Charlotte magazine, Our State: The Magazine of North Carolina, Humanities magazine, Vietnam Veterans of America magazine, US Weekly and People magazine. Martin currently teaches photography and digital media at Summit School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1967 to 1969 and is a lifetime member of the Navy UDT-SEAL Museum Association.