San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Gonzo photographer’ took vivid Vietnam War images
Tim Page, one of the preeminent photographers of the Vietnam War, known as much for his larger-than-life personality as for his intense and powerful combat photographs, died Wednesday at his home in New South Wales, Australia. He was 78.
His death, from liver cancer, was confirmed by his longtime partner, Marianne Harris.
A freelancer and a free spirit whose Vietnam pictures appeared in publications around the world in the 1960s, Page was seriously wounded four times, most severely when a piece of shrapnel took a chunk out of his brain and sent him into months of recovery and rehabilitation.
Page was one of the most vivid personalities among a corps of Vietnam photographers whose images helped shape the course of the war. He was a model for the crazed, stoned photographer played by Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”
Michael Herr, in his book “Dispatches” (1977), called him the most extravagant of the “wigged-out crazies” in Vietnam and noted that he “liked to augment his field gear with freak paraphernalia, scarves and beads.”
In “The Vietnam War: An Eyewitness History” (1992), Sanford Wexler wrote, “Page was known as a photographer who would go anywhere, fly in anything, snap the shutter under any conditions, and when hit go at it again in bandages.”
In his later years, Page was as thoughtful as he had been flamboyant and as articulate about the personal costs of war as he had been about its thrills.
“I don’t think anybody who goes through anything like war ever comes out intact,” he said in an interview with the New York Times in 2010.
He published a dozen books, including two memoirs, and most notably “Requiem” a collection of pictures by photographers on all sides who had been killed in the various Indochina wars.
Page was born in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in Britain on May 25, 1944, the son of a British sailor who was killed in World War II. He was adopted and never knew his birth mother. His name at birth was John Spencer Russell.
At 17, he left England in search of adventure, leaving behind a note that read: “Dear Parents, am leaving home for
Photographer Tim Page was wounded four times while taking images that helped shape the course of the Vietnam War. Europe or perhaps Navy and hence the world. Do not know how long I shall go for.”
He added instructions for paying a possible fine for a motorcycle accident and concluded, “You wouldn’t understand reasons for leaving but don’t contact authorities as I shall write periodically.”
He went well beyond Europe, into the Middle East, India and Nepal, ending his journey in Laos as the Indochina war was just beginning.
He found freelance work with United Press International and won a job with photographs of an attempted coup in Laos in 1965. He spent most of the next five years covering the Vietnam War, working largely on assignment for Time and Life magazines, UPI, Paris Match and the Associated Press.
His photography was notable for its raw drama and its intimacy with danger, the product of the risks he took to immerse himself in combat.
“Perhaps Page’s most striking pictures are of the GIs,” William Shawcross wrote in an introduction to “Tim Page’s Nam” (1983). “Poor whites and Blacks plucked from the ignorant and often innocent island of America’s heart and cast without understanding or preparation into an utterly alien and terrifying world.”
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 for disturbing the peace, along with Jim Morrison of the Doors, during a melee at a concert in New Haven, Conn. “I danced about with my camera shooting the punch out,” he wrote in an essay. “An officer grabbed me and began beating me.” He was held in jail overnight.
In the 1970s, he worked as what he called a “gonzo photographer,” tripping with and covering the drug-fueled world of rock, hippies and Vietnam veterans, mostly for music magazines such as Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone.
He returned regularly to Vietnam after the war to shoot assignments, run photo workshops and photograph victims of Agent Orange, a carcinogenic defoliant sprayed by the U.S. military to clear jungles there.
In 2009, he spent five months in Afghanistan as a “photographic peace ambassador” for the United Nations.
He also covered turmoil in East Timor and the Solomon Islands and finally settled near Brisbane, Australia, serving as an adjunct professor at Griffith University.
In addition to Harris, he is survived by his son, Kit, from his earlier relationship with Clare Clifford.