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| Philip Jones Griffiths |
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Sunday, February 13, 1972. Anyone who purchased London’s Sunday Times newspaper would be confronted with an image on the cover of that day’s magazine supplement that distilled the full tragedy of war. The discreet typography read “The Vietnamese noncombatant.” The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a Vietnamese woman, her leathery hand clasped to her face. Her head is entirely wrapped in bandages, and a label held to her wrist with wire identifies her as just another statistic in the unforgiving brutality of military conflict. It is an image of the most abject pity, an indelible indictment of war in all its arbitrary horror and cruel futility.
This powerful picture’s author was Philip Jones Griffiths. Born and brought up in Wales, his interest in photography was sparked in the 1950s. He won a place to study pharmacy at Liverpool University and started to work as a pharmacist. But his passion for picture-making was to determine his career, from his first part-time work for the Manchester Guardian to his decision to abandon pharmacy and launch himself as a freelance photographer in 1961. His core interest was social documentary work, undertaken from a profoundly sympathetic humanist concern for the downtrodden, for the incidental casualties of social and political injustice. Jones Griffiths was a powerful believer in the potential of photography to redress injustice and inequality. His has always been a passionate, crusading spirit, uncompromising and combative in causes that have inspired him.
In the summer of 1966 he went to Vietnam. Over the next few years Jones Griffiths traveled extensively throughout that war-torn country, seeking the grim reality of the conflict as it dragged the civilian population in provincial towns and in the countryside into a mire of death and destruction. Jones Griffiths made it his particular task to document the plight of ordinary people, the noncombatants. In 1967 he joined Magnum as an associate, becoming a full member in 1971. He represented unequivocally the moral values and social conscience of its founding fathers, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour.
Vietnam Inc., first published in New York in 1971, gathered in book form some of his most powerful images from his long reportage. It is a savage indictment of war in general and specifically of American policy in pursuing a fight that could never be won and within which the political decision-makers appeared to find it all too easy to discount the human costs. The Sunday Times’s feature announced the publication of the book in the UK and reached a very substantial audience. Jones Griffiths and his fellow war photographers brought their unflinching visual account of the reality of the war in Vietnam into the consciousness of a vast public, shifting public opinion and helping to bring the destruction to an end. His 2003 book, Agent Orange, showed the tragic consequences of the indiscriminate use by the Americans in Vietnam of this innocuously named but devastatingly toxic chemical herbicide. Jones Griffiths’s disgust at man’s capacity for thoughtless destruction has not softened with age.
Today, inquisitive cameras are kept well away from the battlefield, and independent photojournalists are generally denied access to the so-called collateral effects of war. Jones Griffiths would surely not consider himself a hero, yet his ambition to use his camera in the service of humanity, his commitment to a free and responsible press, demand respect and mark him as a heroic figure in the history of photography.
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