Tim Page, the legendary Vietnam War photographer, passed away following a battle with liver cancer at the age of 78 yesterday (24 August 2022). Page, lived a remarkable life covering conflict as a young photographer, but what is even more remarkable was the fact that he survived the brutal battle space that was the war in Indochina, despite having been badly injured on four occasions — the last of which left a hole the size of an orange in his brain.
I had the pleasure of meeting with and speaking to Page in March 2019, when he was in Singapore for the “Battlefield Lens: Photographers of Indochina Wars 1950 – 1975” exhibition. Page was one of many photographers whose visual accounts of a bloody conflict that was being fought not so far away, brought the war much closer to home. Even today, more than four decades after the war’s last shots were fired, the haunting images these photographers captured still speak to us, reminding us of war’s grim realities and also, now that we’ve moved on from that conflict, the sheer futility of it all. During my conversation with Page, I was as captivated by the some of the stories that he shared as much as by some of the stories behind the images that he had captured.
The scars that covering the war left on Page, went beyond his injuries. The conflict exacted a huge toll on the media fraternity in Vietnam, and took the lives of many of Page’s photographer colleagues, who counted among some of his closest friends. One of Page’s colleagues’ was Sean Flynn, who we in Singapore are acquainted with from his role in the 1967 French-Italian production Cinq Gars pour Singapour / Cinque Marines per Singapore (English title: Five Ashore in Singapore). Flynn, the son of the better known actor Errol Flynn and his first wife, embarked on a career in photojournalism and covered the war as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict, pausing in 1966 to act in the movie. He disappeared in Cambodia close to its border in Vietnam in 1970 and was thought to have been captured by the Viet Cong. Flynn would never be seen again and was declared legally dead in 1984. Page who had developed a friendship with Flynn, has spent much of his life trying to find traces of Flynn and Dana Stone, a CBS cameraman who disappeared with Flynn.
I recall Page also speaking at length on a photograph taken by a North Vietnamese army photographer by the name of The Dinh, which quite masterfully captured a shadow of himself that was cast on an overrun South Vietnamese artillery position. Page related how The Dinh, who had been thought to have been killed during the war, literally came to life during the Requiem exhibition in Vietnam. The exhibition, which Page co-curated, featured the works of photographer killed in the conflict. The Dinh took the opportunity to identify himself at the exhibition’s opening, to enable him to put in a claim for his pension.
North Vietnamese army photographers, as it turned out, went by a nom-de-guerre. This made it difficult to establish their real identities. The Dinh was thought to have been killed as another photographer who had died during the conflict had also gone by the name. Page was able to track this The Dinh down after the exhibition, finding him in a dwelling located by a clogged canal in Hoi An where he was living out his life as a mural painter. A stash of several boxes of negatives that The Dinh had on him, which contained images he had taken during the war, left little doubt that the mural artist and the photographer in question was one and the same. Page was also able to establish that The Dinh had been a soldier with no knowledge of photography before taking on his army photographer role. A superior, on making the observation that The Dinh had artistic ability from the images of battle that he had captured on a sketchpad, thrust an East German made Praktica camera into The Dinh’s hands, turning the soldier and artist into an unlikely photographer.
Information on Tim Page works can be found at his website: http://www.timpage.com.au/nam-box-set
