The Mission Council, Saigon, South Vietnam

Avedon knew he would have mere minutes to photograph the U.S. generals, ambassadors, and policy experts who ran the war in Vietnam—not the weeks he spent refining his first mural. Planning in advance, he requested the heights of the men known collectively as the Mission Council and mapped out their positions, with careful attention to rank and influence. He rigged a makeshift studio at the embassy in Saigon, and recalled that once assembled, they “lined up like high school boys. They all wanted to be in the picture.” This is true of all but Ted Shackley, the camera-averse CIA station chief known to colleagues as the Blond Ghost, who begged out of the sitting for “a meeting,” leaving a void in the rightmost panel.

As blunt and procedural as a police lineup, the mural recalls Avedon’s first photography gig as a teenager in the Merchant Marine, where he made mugshot-style portraits of new recruits. Here, scrutinizing the faces of the war’s top brass, Avedon invokes their unseen operatives and victims. When the work was later published, one critic deemed it “a terrifying picture of business as usual.”