Barbara Gluck

Barbara Gluck is a female photographer who spent time photographing the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 70s, photographing both the US and Viet Cong soldiers. The quality of her work can be gaged from the fact that the results of it have since been described as the ‘Cartier Bressons’ of the Vietnam War.

Her photos were held in high esteem and she was invited back to Vietnam in 2005 to speak at a conference to mark 30 years since the end of the war. She also used that opportunity to take pictures of the country again, for a book on Vietnam: Then and Now.

She won the 1973 World Press Photo Foundation Award for best news photo, and also received the Poynter Fellowship from Yale University the following year for excellence in journalism.

Following the war, she moved away from war and conflict photography, pursuing a career as an art photographer instead. Her ‘Light Painting’ series were widely viewed during the late 1970s.

Gluck’s career took an unusual turn in the mid-1980s when she stopped being primarily a photographer to pursue a ‘healing institute’ and a new process of healing the body and mind. The organisation she founded was entitled The Light Institute of Galisteo, which later become the Global Light Network.

I find many things about Gluck fascinating, and can identify with each part of her career as it has developed. I understand the adrenalin she must have got from being in Vietnam, but then her time as an art photographer is something I find fantastic, as art photography is, I feel, my forte. Then to move away from this and into the world of spiritual healing again is something I understand, providing her, I imagine, with an incredible contrast between the chaos and brutality of war and the calm and peace of true enlightenment.