The show features more than 60 photos, including Bob Seitz’s “Into the Maw of War.”
Army photographers Peter Finnegan and Bob Seitz parted company in 1971, in Vietnam. They returned from a war that most wanted to forget, and their work was forgotten, too. The two Wisconsin natives even lost track of each other.
“The Vietnam War and Its Lasting Impact,” a new exhibit in the Playhouse Gallery of the Overture Center for the Arts, reunites the two photographers with their wartime images. The exhibit, which runs Sept. 10 through Oct. 16, is presented by Overture and Housing Initiatives, a Madison nonprofit that provides housing for people who are homeless, including veterans.
Seitz shot mostly black-and-white, Finnegan in color. More than 60 photos are featured. Their subjects vary widely. “Just GIs doing their job, the civilians, life in the field, but no dead bodies,” says Finnegan, who, with Seitz, was stationed in Biên Hòa, near Saigon. “Lots of children in a war-torn country.”
Seitz, who lives in Tomahawk, and Finnegan, a Madison resident, both served in the Army Second Field Force and worked as photographers for Hurricane, an Army magazine.
“I would go out in the field with the reporters and the writers,” recalls Finnegan. “The Army would pick out what they wanted, and the rest were basically for the cutting room floor.”
Finnegan regularly gathered his unused color slide film. “I’d wrap them in tissue paper and send them back to my mother in Fennimore,” he says. “She put them up in this old trunk up there in my room — which, by the way, stayed the same as it was from the time I left high school.”
But once he returned to the States, nobody wanted to hear Finnegan’s war stories. “I got back here and tried to assimilate back in from Vietnam. I just kind of left it behind me and let it go.”
Peter Finnegan’s photo of a Viet Cong prisoner, and “Patrol.”
Now retired, Finnegan worked for many years for Professional Pest Control in Madison. In 1998 his daughter Meagan was studying the Vietnam War in her East High School history class. She urged him to take out the trunk full of film.
“I started going through some of that stuff and thought, ‘These are really good.’ A lot better than I remembered,” says Finnegan. “How do I share these with other Vietnam vets?”
He’s since been showing around 100 of his many photos at veterans’ events around the Midwest. In 1999, he exhibited at Overture’s predecessor, the Madison Civic Center. Capital Times critic Jake Stockinger wrote, “These hauntingly powerful images easily hold their own against the published work of famous professional photographers from that era.”
Seitz has never contributed photos to an exhibit before. “Recognizing and remembering the war has helped me and other veterans with our healing, a process that never seems to be complete,” he writes in a press statement. “For others both young and old, my work sparks curiosity and interest in a time that is still meaningful and relevant.”
The photographers were reunited by chance after a friend alerted Finnegan to some prints by Seitz that were hanging on the wall of an Army surplus store in Tomahawk. “Staff at Housing Initiatives knew each of the photographers, and learned that they’d served together but hadn’t seen each other since the war,” says Dean Loumos, the program’s executive director. The two were reunited by phone, and then in person at Housing Initiatives’ office.
“We had a great reunion, remembering old times and Army buddies,” says Finnegan.
A reception will be held for the photographers on Sept. 21, 5 to 8 p.m., in the Playhouse Gallery. Special guests will include Madison’s Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, authors of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War.
