The death of Tim Page, Vietnam’s risk-all photographer

“Save me, I’m a rocker” had Tim Page stamped on his helmet during the Vietnam War. Of the British photographer, posterity will no doubt retain the character as much as the images: Tim Page certainly marked the Vietnam War by publishing candid photos in the press of the time, taken as close as possible to the fighting, but above all he left the memory of a flamboyant cheat on death, wounded several times, mixing war, drugs and rock’n’roll in an explosive cocktail – to the point of inspiring the character of the crazy and stoned journalist played by Dennis Hopper in the movie Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola. The photographer died on August 24, at age 78, in Bellingen, Australia, from liver cancer.

If the Vietnam War came to shape his whole life, Tim Page nevertheless fell into photojournalism by chance. Born May 25, 1944, in Tunbridge Wells, UK, he left his parents in suburban London aged 17 with a letter saying he was leaving “to Europe, or maybe the Navy, and from there to the world.” The young man did all the jobs and all kinds of traffic in Asia, before arriving in Laos in 1963, where he began to work for the United Press International (UPI) agency. He learned photography on the job, and moved to Saigon for several years to cover the war independently, publishing his photos in magazines Time and Life, Paris Match and the AP and UPI agencies – images full of fury and red dust, amid the evacuation of the wounded and alongside terrorized civilians caught in the fighting.

“We lived like the soldiers, in primitive conditions, the photographer will tell World in 1998. We suffered with them. To take pictures was to survive. It was impossible to calculate our chances of staying alive. Photographing someone with a hole in their throat is a bit perverse. Korean soldiers accepted that we photograph excruciating torture, but not an execution. War is more pornographic than a movie. »

“Swing on the edge of the void”

He shares his apartment in Saigon with another photographer, Sean Flynn, the son of the famous actor Errol Flynn, who has the same passion for motorcycles and the music of the Mothers of Invention, which they listen to thoroughly. “We were a small group made up of photographers, journalists and a few TV people who were often in the field, who understood the fear and the horror, but who could still swing on the edge of the void”, will tell Tim Page in the Guardian, in 2016. He sometimes leaves Vietnam to cover the 1967 Arab-Israeli war or a Doors concert in New Haven (State of Connecticut), which earned him to end up in prison after a scuffle, stoned, with singer Jim Morrison .

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