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It’s possible you haven’t heard of Philip Jones-Griffiths, but you should have. He is arguably the most influential Welshman of all time. One of the most respected photojournalists in the world, his book Vietnam Inc. had a major influence on public opinion. It quite probably brought about the war’s end sooner. During the making of a documentary for BBC Wales I filmed an interview with Philip which was a great privilege. He was clearly not well at the time. And, sadly in the following weeks Philip died of cancer. I now find myself writing his obituary.

Within months of his birth in 1936 in the border town of Rhuddlan, a bloke called Robert Capa took one of the most famous war photographs of all time -The Falling Soldier in civil war Spain. It heralded the beginning of a new golden age of photojournalism. This image would have a profound impact on Philip when he was older, a catalyst for his decision become a photographer. But as a young lad growing up in North Wales, the best Philip could look forward to was a place as a holiday camp photographer at the Golden Sands in Rhyl so, unsurprisingly, he chose a different career as a pharmacist. But he had the sort of questioning mind that drew him back to photography. In his spare time he took on part time work for the Manchester Guardian.

By 1961 Philip had moved to London and was working for The Observer. His first big assignment was the brutal war in Algeria between France and the National Liberation Front. In 1962, as the war moved into its final stages, civilians in the Atlas Mountains had been moved into guarded villages while the French napalmed the surrounding countryside to destroy all food and cover for the guerrillas. Nobody had even tried to photograph these camps. Philip flew to North Africa and trekked into the Atlas Mountains with a platoon of FLN guerrillas and became the first photographer to see and photograph these camps. This experience set a precedent for his interest in the impact of war on civilians.

In 1965 he went to Vietnam to work for Magnum Photos, a fiercely independent picture agency that was set up after the second world war by photographers Robert Capa, Cartier Bresson, David Seymour and George Roger to protect the integrity of their work. At the time the coverage of the war was patriotic and one sided. When I asked Philip about the situation he found himself in he considered the parallel from his youth.

“ I was born in a little Welsh village where people had a sense of values, a sense of self and of who they were, under attack of course because we knew that all the things we stood for were being diluted as the English came across and essentially took over a lot of Wales. But I think all of this has stood me in good stead, it made me cognisant of seeing this phenomenon on a much larger scale.

“ Injustice is something I object to, I fight against it. Once I realised that I didn’t understand what was going on in Vietnam, that what we were being told was incorrect, I knew I had to unravel it and find out what the truth was.”

The images that Philip sent back from Vietnam did not sit comfortably with the picture editors of the newspapers and magazines who wanted to support the American troops. They were very difficult for Magnum to sell and out of this need to get the images to a wider public the concept of Vietnam inc. was born, a book that was to become a legend in its own right.

At the 2001 republication of the book on its 30th anniversary John Pilger the award winning journalist said: “There’s no other book like Vietnam Inc. It’s the most powerful document that tells us about that war, that makes sense of that war. Philip and I worked in Vietnam in 1969-70. Other photographers were only interested in the Vietnamese as victims, only interested in Vietnam as a war. Philip saw them as a people and he saw Vietnam as a country. And that made his work intensely political and compassionate. I’ve always seen the Vietnam War as a rape and I think Philip did too. He looks behind the facades, he looks behind the screens, he lifts the rocks with his camera, he tells us something we are not being told, he goes through all the smoke screens that the official view of events always throws up, so he is truly subversive, for me it is almost a definition of journalism to be subversive.”

Philip is quite modest about the book, and while it could never have brought the war to an end it is commonly believed that the effect of this profound work caused the newspaper publishers and TV networks to question the coverage they were giving the war and slowly to change direction. While talking about the truth of the black and white still image Philip says “ I believe that one of the clues to the power of the still image is that on those occasions when you have film footage of a subject versus the still image , although initially, possibly millions more people might see the moving image on TV, a month later, a year later or maybe a century later it’s the still image people remember. The iconic still image has a way to embed itself in the brain in a way that the moving image is too fleeting, too confused [to do], it’s the still image that we respond to.”

Philip tells me about a hospital in Vietnam set up by the Americans for the Vietnamese: “There was only one Spanish surgeon in the whole hospital and every morning he decided who would live and who would die because you can only save the people he was sure could be saved. The ones who couldn’t were shunted off to a room and I was in this room. I looked around and there was this kid about 9 or 10 years old, his face was halfway to being a skull. He’d been napalmed and there was a lot of bone showing, it was a horrendous sight and I thought I can’t do this, I really can’t do this. So I turned around and was photographing someone else when I felt this little tug on my shirt, so I turned back and he pointed at the camera and said ‘click my picture’. So I took his picture, it’s never been published, but I thought maybe one day there’ll be a Nuremberg trial and Kissinger will have this picture hung around his neck as he’s taken to the firing squad. But of course these things don’t happen.”

I asked Philip about photojournalism in the 21st century. Is it still be possible to get to the truth in these times of embedded coverage, tight censorship and the war on terror?

He said the young photographers of today have different problems to deal with, but the truth does always come out in the end, you only have to look at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That story came out because of the internet, because soldiers were posting those pictures on the internet.

After Vietnam Inc. was published, Philip was banned from the country and it wasn’t until years later that he could return. His need to tell the truth of Vietnam drove him these past years, there have been many more books not least Agent Orange, Dark Odyssey and Vietnam at Peace. He died working on two more books, one on his early photographs from London and Wales, and one on his beloved Cambodia. During the interview he quite openly talked of having his ashes scattered in Angkor Wat. Then he smiled and said maybe half my ashes, the other half should go to Wales.

It is hoped that a permanent home for Philip’s work will be found at the National Museum in Cardiff. The images of Philip Jones-Griffiths are very challenging, they ask difficult questions, they are evidence. They hold all of us accountable.
This interview was conducted during filming of War Photography: An On Show Special to be broadcast on BBC2W, 7pm 19th May.

Legendary Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones-Griffiths passed away a few weeks ago. Huw Talfryn Walters was one of the last people to interview him

Reflections on War