Barbara Gluck '59: A Photographer Shoots War

In 1968 Barbara Gluck went to Southeast Asia to visit a friend who was a New York Times correspondent in Saigon. At the time, just nine years after graduating from NYU, she was a successful advertising executive who earlier in her career had spearheaded the first major Richard Avedon exhibit in New York City, among other projects.

Gluck brought along several Nikon cameras to photograph what was supposed to be a three-week-visit. She stepped foot in Saigon three days before a major North Vietnamese offensive. Spellbound by the scenes of war, she decided there was no returning to Madison Avenue and her sojourn turned into a four-year stint as a freelance war photographer. She sold her work – photographs of battles and bombings - to the Times, the Associated Press and Newsweek. In 1970, she returned to the United States, married the Joseph Treaster - -the Times correspondent she originally went over to visit, and took a full-time job with the paper. From January 1972 through November 1973 she covered the war as a team with her husband.

“I had no fear,” Gluck said. “I had this very clear mission and determination to cover the war in ways other people were not showing it. I spent a lot of time photographing things most photographers were not getting.”

One of her photographs, featured on the front page of the Times’ “Week in Review,” showed a shell-shocked woman in a field of refugees. “These devastated people had just come out of the siege of An Loc,” said Gluck. “My attempt was simply to document the pain on the periphery of the war. It was about capturing that decisive moment when everything is revealed.”

This March, 32 years after her first journey, Gluck will return to Vietnam to photograph the people and the land. The Vietnamese government invited Gluck to participate in an event in Ho Chi Mihn City commemorating the 30th anniversary of the end of the war and the liberation of their country. Gluck will join international journalists who covered the war in what the government bills as “a week of reunion and reconciliation.”

While she is there, independent filmmaker Paul Evans will follow Gluck and the translator she worked with more than three decades ago, filming her experiences for a television series entitled, “The Lives of Great American Artists.” Gluck will be featured in the program produced by Albuquerque Motion Pictures Inc.

Later in April, the Vietnam War Media Veterans Committee is holding a reunion in Saigon that Gluck will also attend.

Gluck hopes to turn her new experiences in Vietnam into a photojournalism book and exhibit focusing on the images of the people and land she captured decades ago and juxtaposing them to what she sees today.

In September, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, will open it first photojournalism exhibit “Pictures From The Press,” which will feature several of Gluck’s iconic war photographs.

Gluck attributes much of her success as a photojournalist to her experiences at NYU. “What we did for one year was study the New York Times, how the articles were written, how they were placed, every detail of how it was put together - we immersed ourselves in it,” she said. “It was a huge influence on my life. I never stopped reading it and I had a career there. It was a clear path from NYU. NYU gave me the background that enabled me to become an excellent photojournalist.”

In between her years covering the war and her upcoming trip to Vietnam, Gluck focused her photography on her natural surroundings and found inspiration in the American South West terrain. She also ventured into painting, producing “Light Paintings” depicting explosions of color and prism-like color streams on black backgrounds. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Gluck’s work found audiences around the world in one-woman museum exhibits and gallery shows.

In 1984, Gluck began her career as a healing facilitator, co-founding The Light Institute of Galisteo outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Four years later, she left that organization and founded The Global Light Network, where she developed a healing philosophy and system she calls “The Soul Matrix Clearing, Healing and Empowerment Process.” Gluck traveled the world, training facilitators, giving workshops and implementing her philosophy.

Today she has come full-circle, organizing her vintage images and creating exciting new ones. “Having had the courage to risk over and over again has been the greatest blessing of my life,” said Gluck. “It enabled the extraordinary ‘out of the box’ life I have lived.”

Gluck’s photography and paintings can be viewed at her personal website:
http://www.barbaragluck.com/index.html