Chas Gerretsen

Chas Gerretsen ( born July 22, 1943 in Groningen, Netherlands) is a Dutch photojournalist and advertising photographer.

Life

Gerretsen left at the age of 16 years his homeland to two years to travel through Europe before 1961 immigrated to Australia in 1963 and from there to the USA.

Work

1968 Chas visited Vietnam for the first time he stepped over the border from Cambodia at Go Dau Ha. Between 1968 and 1972, Chas was a war photographer in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. At the very beginning, Chas learned this the American photojournalist Dana Stone. know who has become known in the Vietnam War through his work for CBS. Chas worked at this time as a freelancer for media such as ABC, Newsweek and United Press International.

Gerretsen was internationally known for his photos of the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. Became famous for his portrait of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, whom he photographed a few weeks after the coup. It is considered the incarnation of the South American dictator par excellence. Chas took the picture with the blessing of Pinochet by a Catholic priest in a church in Santiago on.

In 1974 he was honored along with David Burnett and Raymond Depardon for reports on the coup in Chile in 1973 with the Robert Capa Gold Medal.

From 1975 to 1989 he lived in Los Angeles, where he founded the photo agency Mega Prod Inc.. In 1976, he worked in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979 ) as a still photographer. He sang with the dating from the 1984 American comedy film Romancing the Stone.