Thomas Bill Hardt (b. 1937, Chemnitz) is a German photographer who recorded the brutal scenes of Vietnam war.

With images of the Vietnam War, he became known in the late 1960s worldwide. His pictures documented for the first time the horrors of this war, especially in the faces of the children he has photographed and which are a dominant theme of many of his photographic reports since then.

Since 1987 he has often represented the UNO and child welfare organization, UNICEF.

Born in Chemnitz in 1937, the craft of photography was something he learned from his mother. Thereafter, he attended a college of applied art in Magdeburg for three years. In Braunkohlerevier Grosskayna, he got to know the dark side of his profession – the capturing on film accident scenes, the heavily injured and dead. In 1959 he was admitted to study at the University of Graphics and Literature in Leipzig. After completion, he began working for the Central Community of the Freedom for German Youth (FDJ), during the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Era. Between 1962 and 1985, he had traveled to and from the Soviet Union more the fifty times, twelve times to Northern Vietnam and more than twenty times to Italy. He was fascinated by the contradiction mirrored in the faces of people he saw.

Vietnam War images

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