Larry Burrows saw his first war develop in the processing trays of the Time-Life darkroom in London during World War II. Burrows, born to an English working-class background, spent the war years as a teenager doing lab work for some of the great Life photographers who covered the fighting in Europe, including Robert Capa. Studying all those proof sheets must have fused in his mind in a particularly visceral way the connection between combat and photography, as well as providing a critical education as to what makes the picture of a battle successful or not. The evidence of how well he absorbed these lessons is on display in “Larry Burrows: War and Peace” at the Lawrence Miller Gallery in Midtown.

Another assignment Burrows had for Life in the years after World War II, when he had become a photographer himself, also helped to prepare him for his role as a combat photographer in Vietnam – even though it involved work far removed from any battlefield. He was sent to help Dmitri Kessel photograph great works of art for reproduction in the magazine; later, he took over the project himself. Studying the glories of high art in the process of shooting them, he learned how to frame and compose a picture, and how the use of color informs a photograph’s content, may even become its content.

About half of the pictures in the present exhibition are black-and-white images he took before arriving in Indochina in 1962. These are all competent and show what he had absorbed from the best photojournalists of midcentury, but there is something generic about them; they put you in mind of the other photographers who might have taken them. “Outside the Royal Exchange, London” (1958) is a backlit street shot of a man in a bowler hat with a watch chain across his vest, holding a “brolly” as he waits at the curb for a cab or bus. “London Varieties” (1946) is a charming picture of three young girls in pigtails, cotton dresses, and Oxfords leaning over to study the offerings on a posted theatrical playbill. “‘Why Do I Love You?’ Louis Armstrong, Over Africa” (1956), shows the trumpeter practicing in an airplane while a woman sleeps in the reclining chair next to him.

“Brigitte Bardot Prepares to Meet the Press, London”(1959) and “Marilyn Monroe, Lawrence Olivier, and Arthur Miller, London” (1956) are more interesting – two wonderful studies of the relationship between celebrities and what we now call “the media,” the self-conscious movie goddesses surrounded by flash popping photographers. But somehow they are not as wonderful as Gary Winogrand’s explorations of similar material. Even the touching “Winston Churchill, making his first major political speech since retirement as Prime Minister, is moved by a tribute, Woodford, England” (1955), in which we can see the tears that have welled up in the great man’s eye, seems pro forma.

Vietnam was Larry Burrows’s destiny. It is odd to speak of a photojournalist’s war pictures as “personal,” but with his camera, Larry Burrows made the war in Vietnam his own. David Halberstam, the correspondent whose books have been a major factor in the American public’s understanding of the war, wrote in the introduction to “Larry Burrows: Vietnam,” “Because of … his talent, his courage, and his particular feel for the Vietnamese people, he became the signature photographer of that war, a man whose journalism, in the opinion of his colleagues and editors, reached the level of art.” What Capa was to the Spanish Civil War and David Douglas Duncan was to Korea, Burrows was to Vietnam.

Burrows’s humanity and narrative skills are evident in the eight black-and-white prints from “Yankee Papa 13, March 31, 1965,” an article that first brought home to America the nature of the conflict. In the first of the series, a somewhat cocky James Farley, a young gunner, carries his weapon toward the helicopter that will carry him into combat. In the middle pictures, the battle is engaged, and dead and dying crewmen litter the floor of the aircraft, horrible images. In the last picture, Farley is back at the base, alone in a storage room, collapsed in tears.

This is enormously impressive work, but it was in color that Burrows achieved greatness, putting what he had learned in the hushed halls of renowned museums to the service of his photojournalism in the clatter and chaos of war. Probably Burrows’s best-known single image is ” ‘Reaching Out.’ Operation Prairie, Mutter Ridge, Nui Cay Tri, October 5, 1968,” which is shown at Miller in a dye-transfer print, 20-by-30 inches, printed later. The light is softly diffused, ideal for color work. The setting is the top of a hill with scenic grey-green valleys and hills in the distance.

In the midst of several white soldiers, a black soldier strides forward, his dark, dark black face clownishly surrounded by a white bandage, the dangling part of which is red with blood. He is being constrained as he reaches out to a fallen comrade lying, Christ like, on the ground. This man’s head rests against a broken tree stump, his left arm is stretched out towards us and grips a smaller trunk, his wounded leg is bent as in representations of Jesus on the cross, his eyes are shut, his face serene, almost beatific, as he contemplates – what? His pain, his death, his home?

The mud in this picture is exquisite. It is the warm yellow-browns that do this, that give the texture and squish of the mud these men must fight in and die in. The man on the ground is splattered with the mud – not just his uniform but his face, so he seem to be dissolving into it. A shadowed figure to the left, the soldier who is closest to us and not entirely in the picture, turns away as if he has seen enough of dying. But, as in the classic narrative paintings of Western art, the composition draws us back to the drama at its center. Larry Burrows insists that we see what he wants us to see.

When Burrows left for his assignment in Indochina in 1962, he told his wife he intended to stay until there was peace. Nine years later, while covering a Vietnamese incursion into Laos, the helicopter he was in was shot down, and he died.

Until April 30 (20 W. 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-397-3930).