Tim Page, one of the most prominent Vietnam War photographers, known for his intense and powerful combat images as well as his larger-than-life personality, died Wednesday at his home in New South Wales, Australia. he was 78 years old.
His death from liver cancer was confirmed by his longtime partner Marianne Harris.
A freelancer and free spirit whose photographs of Vietnam appeared in publications around the world in the 1960s, Mr. Page was seriously injured four times. rehabilitation.
Mr. Page was one of the most vivid figures in the group of Vietnamese photographers whose images helped shape the course of the war. He was the model for the crazed stony photographer played by Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
In his book Dispatches (1977), Michael Herr called him Vietnam’s most extravagant “wigout crazy” and “liked to bolster his field gear with strange paraphernalia, scarves and beads.” said.
When a publisher asked him if he would write a book that would take the charm out of war, Mr. Herr wrote: I mean, how can you do that?
He continued: I mean, you know you can’t do that.
of 2016 essay In The Guardian, Page described his “band of brothers” as “photographers, writers, and a handful of TV people who are regulars in the field who understand fear and horror and can still understand that fear.” “Hardcore,” explained Rim. “
In The Vietnam War: An Eyewitness History (1992), Sanford Wexler writes: “
In his later years, Mr. Page was as thoughtful as he was flamboyant, and as articulate about the personal costs of war as he was about its thrills.
In an interview with the New York Times in 2010, he said, “I don’t think anyone who has gone through something like war comes out unscathed.
He has published 12 books, including 2 memoirs, most notably ‘Requiem’, a collection of photographs by photographers from all sides killed in various Indochina wars.
Requiem, published in 1997 and co-authored with fellow photographer Horst Faas, was a memorial that he considered one of his most important contributions. The collection was permanently exhibited in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Mr. Paige himself was a man who was near death and seems to have felt a kinship with those who died.
In 2010, he said, “In the end, living and not living mysticism becomes a mystery.”
The closest he came to death was in April 1969, when he stepped out of a helicopter to help unload a wounded soldier. A soldier near him stepped on a mine and was hit by shrapnel.
He was pronounced dead in a military hospital, then resuscitated, then died, and revived again. Endured months of rehab and treatment.
During this time, two fellow photographers rode their motorbikes through the deserted roads of Cambodia in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas and never returned.
Over the decades that followed, Mr. Page repeatedly ventured into the Cambodian countryside in search of the bodies of Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.
He had a close relationship with Mr. Flynn in Vietnam.
“I don’t like the idea of his psyche being tortured,” he said on one of those trips. “There’s something creepy about being MIA.”
that his quest was also an attempt to find a “certain peace” for his own soul, to put together what he called “a giant jigsaw puzzle, a piece of sky, a piece of earth.” he admitted.
Timothy John Page was born on May 25, 1944, in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, the son of a British sailor killed in World War II. He was adopted and did not know his mother where he was born. His birth name was John Spencer Russell.
At the age of 17 he left England in search of adventure and left a note: I don’t know how long it will go. “
He added instructions to pay the fine for the motorcycle accident, and concluded, “As I regularly write, you will not understand why you are leaving, but you will not contact the authorities.” rice field.
He traveled far beyond Europe to the Middle East, India and Nepal, ending his journey in Laos, where the Indochina War had just begun.
He found freelance work at United Press International, working with photographs of the failed coup attempt in Laos in 1965. He spent most of the next five years covering the Vietnam War, primarily for Time & Life magazine, UPI, and Paris Match. and Associated Press.
His photography was notable for its raw drama and closeness to the dangers that were the product of the risks he took to immerse himself in combat.
“Perhaps Paige’s most striking photograph is that of GI,” wrote William Shawcross in the preface to Tim Page’s Nam (1983). “Poor whites and blacks have been plucked from the island of ignorance and innocence in America and thrown, without understanding or preparation, into a world so alien and terrifying.”
Page took a break and traveled to the Middle East to cover the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
In December of that year, he was arrested along with Jim Morrison of The Doors for disturbing the peace during a brawl at a concert in New Haven, Connecticut. in an essay. “The police grabbed me and started beating me.” He spent one night in jail.
In the 1970s, he worked as a “gonzo photographer”, traveling and documenting the drug-ridden world of rock, hippies, and Vietnam veterans, primarily for music magazines such as Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone. Did.
After the war, he returned to Vietnam regularly to photograph missions, hold photography workshops, and photograph the victims of Agent Orange, a carcinogenic defoliant sprayed by the U.S. military to clear the jungle. did.
In 2009, I spent five months in Afghanistan as a UN Photographic Peace Ambassador.
He also covered turmoil in East Timor and the Solomon Islands, eventually settling near Brisbane, Australia, where he was an adjunct professor at Griffith University.
In addition to Ms. Harris, she has a surviving son, Kit, from a previous relationship with Claire Clifford.
Page was working on two more books and a photo archive when he was diagnosed with cancer in May.
After escaping death many times, he realized that there was no cure for inoperable cancer.
“Yeah, you know, we’ve always bounced to the other side, but I don’t think it’s going to be this time,” he said over the phone from Australia shortly after his diagnosis. I hope it’s painless.”