John Godfrey Morris (December 7, 1916 – July 28, 2017) was an American picture editor, author and journalist, and an important figure in the history of photojournalism.
[2] At the University of Chicago, John G. Morris and friends issued a student newspaper Pulse in September, 1937 which they published until March, 1941, when America became involved in WW2.
It was a bold attempt to launch their careers in journalism, described by Morris as; "a radically different college publication, its news section modelled on Time, a monthly survey in the manner of Fortune, and photographs of the candid-camera type, like those in Life"[2] The colleagues went into professional careers: Paul Berg became a staff photographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, John Corcoran for Science Illustrated, Myron Davis for Life, and David Eisendrath for the Chicago Times and New York's PM.
In 1968 he insisted that a photo by Eddie Adams of the Associated Press (AP), showing a South Vietnamese police official in the act of executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a shot to the head, be run on the front page of the New York Times.
Four years later, he selected another photo by Nick Ut, showing a naked and screaming Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack.
It contains the photographs Morris took during his Summer 1944 trip to Normandy, shortly after the D-Day landing on June 6, 1944, and the letters to his wife written "somewhere in France.