Framing a Shot: Intercode Adaptations and Ethical Remembrance of the Vietnam War

This essay analyzes the remediation of Eddie Adams’s photograph Saigon Execution (1968) through various (pop culture) media, focusing on how graphic narratives have adapted this iconic shot. These adaptations problematize the construction and perception of the narrative embedded in the photograph. Various comics have appropriated and subverted its embedded narrative by “framing this shot” within a broader (set of) image(s). Indeed, the framing of Saigon Execution within a sequential graphic narrative opens up new possibilities for interpretation,raising questions about the role of the “industry of memory,” the framing gaze of the (American) photographer,the racial body of the Vietnamese subject, the ethics of memory, and the osmosis between private and public images.