Japan Pictoureal

Tim Page in Brisbane, Australia

I was going back through some old documents the other day and came across an interview I did about 6 years ago with Vietnam war photographer Tim Page. It was such an honor to have had the chance to talk with Mr. Page, and apart from being one of my favorite photographers he is also a fascinating man. I don’t know if the story I put together works so well, but either way I have reprinted it below for anyone who might be interested.

Revisiting a Page of the Vietnam War

By ROBERT GILHOOLY

BRISBANE, Australia – A glance around Tim Page’s central Brisbane apartment reveals nothing about his messy, near-calamitous past. On the living room shelves, smoldering incense sticks marshal a neatly arranged congregation of Buddhist statues. Photographs that line the walls – many his own creations – hang impeccably straight. The coffee table and other surfaces are uncluttered, not a discarded cup or plate in sight. Even the ashtray is butt-free.

“Tim doesn’t like things to be messy,” whispers his partner, Marianne, as she wipes down the table. “He’s fussy about that.”

Page’s manner is equally impeccable, a British gentleman with a deep, meandering voice that would seem most suitably applied to poetry reading or Sunday afternoon cricket commentary on the radio. “Would you like a cup of tea?” he calls musically from the kitchen.

It’s only then that hints of what he has been through start to emerge. Page carries in the tea, his progress hindered slightly by a pronounced limp. A Leica M6 camera – the photographer’s Porsche – is almost permanently slung around his neck. Later he shows off a recent acquisition, an aging utility truck, which he has furnished with a couple of stickers. One reads “No War,” the other “Vietnam: Been There, Done That.”

Indeed, Page has well and truly “done” Vietnam. During the war in Indochina, he earned a reputation, even among the most daring of photojournalists, for his suicidal forays into far-flung and treacherous battle zones, adventures that provided the world with some of the most stirring images of the 16-year conflict.

They also resulted in several near-fatal injuries, the last of which required the removal of a fist-size chunk of his brain after a land mine blew shrapnel into his head. He was left paralyzed down one side of his body, a condition from which doctors believed he would never recover.

Miraculously, he did, and 10 years after the end of the war he revisited the Southeast Asian nation to photograph and write a book. Twenty years on “Tim Page’s Nam” is still in print, which is somewhat of a rarity in the world of photo book publishing, and one of a dozen tomes he has penned to date.

He has also been the subject of a plethora of books and movies. He is a prominent character in Michael Herr’s classic Vietnam War book, “Dispatches” while Denis Hopper’s role in “Apocalypse Now!” was based on Page.

Both portray Page as a loopy, doped-up snapper, Herr referring to him as a “wigged-out crazy” and cynical joker who would dance for hours in front of a full-length mirror to the sounds of The Doors. “We’re not men,” Page tells a military officer in one of the book’s lighter moments. “We’re correspondents.”

Understandably, perhaps, Page, who is now in his 60s, is not entirely comfortable with these portrayals. “During wartime, what’s crazy?” he says. “Anyone who’s there is crazy. War doesn’t exactly enhance people’s sanity.

“Yes, I did realize quite early on that if you went with the whacky, the oddball stuff in the middle of nowhere it gave you an advantage. War was everywhere, so you needed to find a different angle. But it’s had a negative spin put on it, Denis Hopper and all that shit. The whacky always attracts more attention than the serious, the mundane.”

It has also taken precedence over the effects of war on correspondents, he says. Page admits “the madness” he witnessed still gives him nightmares. “Everyone in war is a victim, including photographers. Do we suffer from shock, from post-traumatic stress syndrome? Shit, yes!”

He concedes, however, that many young correspondents did confuse their responsibilities. Some carried weapons. Many who did used them.

“We were all young, intrigued and macho in a sense,” says Page, who admits that he, too, “carried heat” and used it in Vietnam. “After a battle there were weapons lying around everywhere. They were like toys. It’s a huge buzz to be able to indulge in your wildest fantasies. It’s the Biggles in us. You’d say: ‘I want to fly a Phantom.’ And someone would say: ‘Sure! Jump on board.’ ”

The image of Biggles – the adventurous, heroic fighter pilot of a series of novels by an early 20th century English aviator – is one Page is probably more comfortable with. He recalls as a 12-year-old cycling from his hometown in the southeast England county of Kent, crossing the channel to Holland and peddling on through Belgium and Germany.

Subsequent two-wheeled adventures took him further. “By the time I was 15, I’d seen half of Europe. And I wasn’t discouraged from doing it (by my family). … I realized at an early age that I couldn’t handle the suburbia mindset.”

At 16, an insurance payout after a near-fatal motorcycle accident supplied him with the funds to travel to Asia, where further accidents awaited him.

First, he was hospitalized in Bombay for 6 weeks due to disease, from which, he says, he was “very lucky to survive.” Later he spent even longer sleeping in a police cell on the Nepalese border – not for any illicit activity (although he admits to having worked as a drug smuggler at one point in his travels), but to wait for someone to fix his clapped out Volkswagen Combi.

He eventually arrived in Kathmandu in early 1963, quickly making friends with a German backpacker who suggested they try to travel overland to Melbourne for Christmas. Page made it as far as Laos, where a series of more pleasant accidents landed him a job as a photographer with United Press International.

“It was a complete accident, me and photojournalism,” Page recalls. “I found myself with a camera in the middle of an attempted coup d’etat in Laos, and the next thing I knew I was in Vietnam shooting a war. It was sink, or swim, and fortunately I’d long had a penchant for staying afloat.”

He also had some rather illustrious snappers to guide him. His first bureau chief in Saigon was the half-Vietnamese, half-French photographer Henri Huet. His mentor in the field was fellow Briton Larry Burrows. His closest friend and Saigon flat-mate was Sean Flynn, son of Tasmania-born Hollywood legend Errol. “They all had a major influence on my work,” Page says. They were all killed in Indochina.

The three are an important part of a book first published in 1997 that Page put together with Associated Press photographer Horst Faas. Titled “Requiem,” it comprises work by 135 photojournalists who lost their lives in Indochina and has since been made into an exhibition that has been shown worldwide.

Page believes it is still poignant, especially in light of the increased restrictions and censorship faced by the media in wartime.

“(Requiem) says very succinctly that all war pictures become anti-war pictures and tries to put into perspective the sacrifices made by the media to get the truth in an age when the Americans would like us all to be ‘in bed’ with them,” Page says.

Despite his cynicism about the lack of media freedom in the Gulf Wars, Page concedes he would love to have been there.

“If I were physically and mentally able, yes, a huge chunk of me would love to be among the madness. I’d love to be there to photograph the victims and to put forward their plight. That was my angle in Vietnam, and it would be today. You see, we very soon forget the victims. It’s not fashionable to remember them.”

Today, Page continues to photograph the victims, albeit in a relatively more photographer-friendly environment. He is currently working on a book about the impact of civil war on Sri Lanka. Recently he visited the Baxter Detention Centre near Port Augusta to take pictures of the refugees detained there.

His motivation to continue snapping more than 40 years after he first stumbled upon his profession lies in the power of the image to instigate change.

“What we (photojournalists) have going for us is compassion,” he says. “In Vietnam, photography swayed public opinion, and it still can. It can still make a difference.”

©Robert Gilhooly 2010