When it comes to Vietnam War photographers, Tim Page is about as legendary as it gets. He’s the one who went to war on a motorbike and, against all odds, survived – three times alone from life-threatening wounds. All the hair-raising stories about him are true, he confirms, and he’s also one of the loveliest, most generous people I’ve ever met.
So, when a message popped up from Tim’s partner Marianne Harris, to say they were heading to Singapore for an exhibition of war photographs, the cool thing was – of course – to join them.
The Battlefield Lens exhibition is just part of a collection amassed by former US marine Judd Kinne.
The 80 photographs which form the exhibition are from the collection of former US Marine Judd Kinne. He’s been hunting down vintage prints taken during the Indochina wars for decades, and this is the first time they have been on display.
It was an early encounter with Life photojournalist Larry Burrows during his war service that sparked Judd’s later interest and his first prints were mainly from the American War. Fortunately for us, he cast his net wider.
In addition to the American War, the exhibition includes pictures from the French War, as well as the work of North Vietnamese photographers, who were unpaid and not expected to survive. There are some iconic images included but Judd’s selection is intended to highlight some less well known but equally powerful shots.
“What strikes me most is the amazing artistry of many of these prints,” he said.
“Not only were the photojournalists recording a story for the wire services or magazines of the day, but they were true artists using a camera instead of a brush and paint to capture powerful images of men, women and children in violent circumstances.”
Your Girl Reporter and Marianne Harris mingling with Tim Page’s picture of a helicopter carrying Prince Norodom Ranariddh away from a political rally in Cambodia, 1993. It’s his Velazquez.
The North Vietnamese pictures featured in Battlefield Lens were tracked down and preserved by Tim, who was also closely involved in putting together the exhibition.
There are many more of them in Requiem, his finished project – with Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Horst Faas – which documents the works of the photojournalists, from all sides of the war, who lost their lives or are still missing, long presumed dead.
On the opening night of Battlefield Lens, Tim said Requiem had been his life’s greatest achievement, and it is indeed an extraordinary record.
Behind the scenes: Judd Kinne and Tim Page put the finishing touches on the Battlefield Lens exhibition. Judd is holding an original poster from the movie The Quiet American. Picture by Marianne Harris.
The Requiem collection is on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City and Your Girl Reporter went to see it last year with my youngest daughter, the Little Chef.
I’m sure she was delighted to be hauled around a bunch of old photographs of death and despair, but I think she was surprised by how many of the pictures, and the photographers who had taken them, were known to me.
If anyone was going to be desensitized by war photographs, it’s probably me. I’d been looking at them since I was four years old at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong, after all. But despite time, distance and, in some cases, familiarity, their power is undiminished.
I saved my most personal reaction for Larry Burrows, the photojournalist who inspired Judd when he met him all those years ago.
I’m sure if my dad, Hong Kong journalist Jack Spackman, was here he’d poke me in the shoulder and say, as he did so often, “Yes of course you knew him! You remember….” and off he would go on some long, meandering tale which, for a good chunk, appeared to hold no relevance to the person in question.
Just as I’d forget where the yarn had begun, he would tie it off to perfection and leave me wishing I’d paid closer attention.
But Dad is not here, and all I know about Burrows begins with that famous picture, taken inside a cramped helicopter where something dreadful is going on. It loomed over me, larger than life, every Sunday from the age of four in the lift lobby of the FCC.
This image by Larry Burrows, from his series ‘One Ride With Yankee Papa 13’ is featured in the Requiem exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City. It used to loom, life-sized, over the lift lobby at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong.
I spent years trying to work out what was happening in that picture, studying it more closely than any other I can think of.
Many of the other photographs on the wall were at my eye-level and easier to understand. Even a four-year-old can recognize a burning monk, a naked girl running screaming towards you, or a man about to get shot in the head. But the Burrows picture was beyond my comprehension for a long time.
I would have been nine or ten when a book turned up at our Macdonnell Road flat in Hong Kong. Like any new book, I was straight on it. Unexpectedly, it included the picture that had so haunted me and which I still couldn’t understand.
For the first time, here was the helicopter picture close up, to confirm what I had long suspected, but was too young to acknowledge, about the human-like figure in the foreground.
Nostalgia and its trimmings: A picture swiped from the internet of Compassionate Photographer, the Burrows book which Your Girl Reporter consumed so avidly. It did not make it into my collection. Current whereabouts: Unknown.
The book was a collection of Burrows’ work and I went through it avidly, taking in all his remarkable pictures and reading every line of text – until finally, when I was done, I saw a few lines that I’d initially missed.
On the frontispiece was a handwritten note from his widow, thanking my parents for all their support after Larry’s death.
He died on 10 February 1971, alongside his fellow photojournalists Henri Huet, Kent Potter and Keisaburo Shimamoto, when their helicopter was shot down over Laos. The book was published about a year later.
I asked Dad about it, but I have no recollection of what he told me. I remember how I felt. All those photographs on the wall of the FCC, and the men and women who took them, had a new and disturbing context.
Weirdly, if you think about it, Dad and Tim never met, despite their numerous mutual friendships. Tim was not a fan of Hong Kong and rarely visited, he tells me, and Dad was not a war journalist.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu said: Tactical dispositions should be concealed. Well, whoops! Your Girl Reporter does some serious and fairly open fangirling with Tim and his battered old Leica from the war. “Every war picture is an anti-war picture” – Tim Page.
For all the people Dad could have named when he urged me to read Despatches by Mike Herr – again, a bit weirdly – he went for Tim Page. It was years before I met Tim in Brisbane, and the last time I saw Jack in California.
“You can’t say you know anything about the Vietnam War if you don’t know about Tim Page,” is how he put it. And then, when I picked up his battered old copy, a load of press cuttings fell out, all relating to people Dad actually knew, who are also mentioned in the book.
Alas, Dad’s copy of Despatches and all those press cuttings, like the Burrows book, have not made it into Your Girl Reporter’s collection. Nostalgia and its trimmings. That’s what he’d say. History worth preserving, would be my view.
Thankfully, there are passionate people out there, like Judd Kinne and Tim Page, who have made it their life’s work to preserve and to share some of the most important images of the 20th century.
Absent Friends: Your Girl Reporter has a complex and emotional reaction to the Larry Burrows section of the Battlefield Lens exhibition, which features my favourite of his pictures, ‘Reaching Out’.
The traditional journalist’s toast is ‘to Absent Friends’. Battlefield Lens is a powerful tribute to the lost and to the living who remember them and preserve their work. It was a privilege to share the experience with one of the few great photojournalists of the 20th century left standing, and to raise a glass with him.
To Absent Friends.
Further reading:
Grim realities of war: Rare photo exhibit featuring a Singaporean’s collection – by Mayo Martin, Channel News Asia.
Tim Page’s website – which opens with ‘his Velazquez’ and is well worth a tour when you’ve finished admiring it.
Sudden Death in Vietnam: One Ride With Yankee Papa 13 – Larry Burrows’ most famous photo essay.
The Story of Larry Burrows – by Kacey Thompson, featuring Your Girl Reporter’s favourite Burrows picture, which is also part of the Battlefield Lens exhibition at the Selegie Arts Centre in Singapore until 10 April.
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