Dhe war ended for him on April 19, 1969 at 1:52 p.m. Actually three minutes later, because his watch was always a bit slow. The moment his Rolex stopped, he’d become a Vietnam veteran without ever firing a bullet. He was injured anyway, after a good four years at the front. He had followed the credo of his colleague Robert Capa: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you weren’t close enough.” Tim Page was close enough, always, on each of the many godforsaken days he spent between the villa in Saigon , where he lived with other war correspondents and commuted back and forth with the day-to-day murders.
The native Brit ran away from home at the age of just 17, with his 15-year-old girlfriend at his side, who was pregnant with twins. They kept moving east. At the age of 20 he landed in Saigon in South Vietnam, where he first used a borrowed Nikon and later switched to Leica to document the horrors of war from then on. He had a talent for capturing situations that seemed to tell entire life stories. Even on his last day, he just wanted to take pictures of two GIs 20 meters away when they stepped on a mine. At least Page woke up days later with splinters in his hip and brain, paralyzed on one side and blind. He was an invalid, physically only a few months, but mentally he probably remained one to the end, even if he took up the camera again. It was his fourth and heaviest war injury.
Tim Page has died at the age of 78
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Image: AFP
What drives a person to repeatedly put their life in danger for a few pictures? For him it was also the feeling of having a family. The other, much more famous photographers had taken him under their wing, he became part of a sworn community that was waging its own war: that of images. The Vietnam War was a propaganda battle, just like the war in Ukraine is today, the pictures of Tim Page, taken for agencies such as UPI and AFP, later for Life magazine, caused the real horror, the actually indescribable misery of the civilians as well Soldiers, only publicly. Page was instrumental in starting an anti-war movement in the United States and the rest of the world, including through a Canadian documentary, The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam, which Page co-wrote and was released in 1965 brought about a change of opinion. That’s one of the reasons why Francis Ford Coppola created a cinematic memorial to him by recreating the character of the journalist Dennis Hopper played in “Apocalypse Now,” Tim Page, with the camera strap across his chest.
Page lost a lot in Vietnam and Cambodia, including his best friends Sean Flynn, son of actor Errol Flynn, and Dana Stone, who went into battle in 1970 and never came back. After that, Page didn’t really feel at home in the supposed peace. He is said to have cried only once: when he was one of the Vietnam veterans at a meeting in 1985 and received standing applause. Tim Page died of liver cancer in Brisbane, Australia on Wednesday at the age of 78.
