Interview with Philip Jones Griffiths

Geert van Kesteren/ Brigitte Lardinois/ Julian Stallabrass

Philip Jones Griffiths is one of the foremost documentary photographers of his generation.
His landmark book, Vietnam Inc. was the most systematic and politically acute book of
photography about the war, and still serves as a model for the possibilities of engaged and
radical documentary. His recent books, Agent Orange and Viet nam at Peace, chart the dire
continuing environmental effects of the war, and conditions in the newly business-friendly
nation. The republication of Vietnam Inc. has made it available to a new generation of anti-
war activists in a period of intense ideological struggle over the production and circulation of
images.

JS: One of the extraordinary things about both books, Vietnam Inc. and Agent Orange, is their
political intelligence. I find it hard to think of other photojournalists who have such a
developed view of the world that is reflected in each picture and the way it is used.

PJG: On Fleet Street, I was told to go after ‗who, what, why, where and when‘ and it didn‘t
take it long for me to work out that ‗why‘ was the only important one. Also, when I was
about eight or nine years old, I had my first lesson in political awareness. American jeeps
arrived in our little school in Wales, all these huge soldiers emerged, the first black people I
had ever seen. They made us all stand in a line and gave us a Mars bar each and I wondered
what‘s going on, what are they trying to do? Who would have thought that all those years
later I would be photographing them doing exactly the same thing in Vietnam? And without
it being rammed down our throats in any way, we were always conscious in Wales that there
were two societies. There were us, the Welsh, who were being quickly overtaken by the
English coming over the border, especially the holidaymakers during the summer. So I grew
up with a keen appreciation of the ills of hegemony.

JS: In terms of what you were reading during the war, was the position in Vietnam Inc.
something that you just worked out for yourself while taking the pictures? Did you have
links with the anti-war movement?

SOUTH VIETNAM. Quin Hon. 1967

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PJG: No, none whatsoever. I distrusted them in a way because I grew up in the ban-the-
bomb period in Britain and one became suspicious of those weekend, armchair communists.
One often felt that the people who were most vociferously anti-war were not those who had
resolved their own problems first. I approached Vietnam rather like chemist analysing an
unknown substance in a pharmaceutical exam. When I arrived I methodically travelled the
whole country to try and work out what was going on. Looking back on it, I tried to
approach it very logically so that when I would see a group of refugees being forced at
gunpoint from their homes and the officer would turn to me and say, ‗Oh, it‘s great to see
these people voting with their feet,‘ I would start laughing. Marched off to camps
surrounded by barbed wire and with a big sign over the gates saying ‗Welcome to Freedom‘
was, apart from anything else, amazingly funny and it didn‘t make sense, it didn‘t add up. It
was pretty obvious that all Vietnamese hated the Americans.

BL: All Vietnamese?

PJG: Yes. Of course, there were pockets of people who were less anti-American, the
Catholics, for instance, in the South, but even they, when you really got to know them,
would become very critical. So why weren‘t the Vietnamese blowing up the Americans all
the time, why weren‘t they carrying out acts of violence? It would have been so easy to do
so—all the bars, all the cafes were open and it would have been so easy to just toss a grenade
in, as they did in the Algerian war. But nobody did. So why didn‘t they? The whole thing had
to be directed in some way, there had to be some mechanism at work and my obsession
became to try to understand what it was.

On my third year there, I did something that came about because a young American gave me
a story that ended up on the front page of the New York Times. An American senior district
advisor, as they were called, was using villagers to clear mine fields: ‗they planted the things,
they should know where they are‘ was his attitude. He was forcing the villagers to walk in
front of the troops with the result that they had more legless people there than anywhere
else. The young American had helped me get the pictures and we got Gloria Emerson to do
the text. The guy who gave me the story was immediately fired and was pretty penniless so I
hired him as my assistant. I told him that I wanted to go on a trip from one end of Vietnam
to the other but the only condition was that he could not speak one word of Vietnamese (for
he was fluent), all he was to do was listen. It was absolutely amazing to discover what people
were actually saying. It was such a confirmation of what I had assumed all along. It was a
great affirmation that I had worked it out correctly; that almost everything the Americans
said, all the positive things they claimed about their effect in Vietnam, were simply not true. I
felt that somehow I had passed an exam and was therefore qualified to write my book.

JS: One of the most striking things about Vietnam Inc. was the use of text in the book, both
the extended captions to the pictures and the longer texts on various subjects with which
you punctuate the picture sequences.1 At that time in the late 1960s and early 1970s and even
earlier, at least implicitly in the work of photographers like Robert Frank, there was a critique
of photojournalism and documentary of the classic type, of the broad and unspecific
humanism of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Dorothea Lange, and part of that critique was

1 Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam Inc., Collier Books, New York 1971.

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about the detachment of photographs from framing texts. How aware were you of that
critique?

PJG: Well, I was aware of it because I absorbed everything that I could find. I was familiar
with Ed van der Elsken‘s photographic novel, Love on the Left Bank.2 There was a lot of text
in it, except I couldn‘t read it because it was in French or Dutch. One was also aware that
Frank was putting out images that were simply there as images, that had no text and no
signposts whatsoever. But at the same time, Eugene Smith was practically writing poems
instead of captions.3 I had absorbed all of that, I suppose. What I tried to do in Vietnam Inc.
was the old ‗one-two‘: what I never do in the text is describe what‘s in the picture. It would
be nonsensical to do that. And there are pictures in the book for which there are no
captions—Magnum will complain about that. In the text pages, there are little pictures and
some of those have no captions—they are meant to be self-explanatory. For me, there was a
greater possibility for putting over a message using words as well as photos. I wasn‘t setting
out to turn the clock back, to say ‗let‘s go back to long captions‘.

JS: The text is highly organised and very specific about its subjects. It is at the opposite end
from the conventional caption that would just say ‗Vietnam, 1968‘. In this way, it prefigures
other practices from photographers of the Left, such as Allan Sekula, who have built their
photographs into extensive textual accounts of their subjects, such as Fish Story about global
maritime trade.4

PJG: I was always aware that captions channel communication. At Look magazine, they had
a machine that would film people looking at the pages. They saw that people would glance at
the pictures in a particular way—it had an S sweep or a Z sweep to it—and then they would
read the caption and that was what they desperately wanted to see. In a sense, because they
wanted to make sure that their perception of the picture was correct, so that the caption
rewarded them for getting it right, exactly as in a quiz show. Captions still count. With
Vietnam Inc. you can simply glance at the pictures, or you can go through it a second time
and read the captions and a third time to read the text. It was specifically designed like that.
What I wanted to avoid was huge blocks of text that no one would respond to.

BL: You did the whole concept of the book and the entire layout. How did that work?

PJG: It was very easy. The publishers gave me a designer and I took a box of prints to show
him and as we went through them, he says, ‗Cor, she‘s got big tits‘, so I went back to Collier-
Macmillan, saying I would very much like to design this book myself. They said: let‘s see
what you can do. So I just did it.

JS: The design does have a functional, sparse feel to it that suits its subject matter.

PJG: There was a lot of criticism at the time about the number of pictures on a page, with
people at Magnum saying, why don‘t you just publish your contact sheets? At the time a

2 Ed van der Elsken, Love on the Left Bank André Deutsch, London, n.d. The book was first published in 1954
and there were editions in French and Dutch.
3 See, for example, W. Eugene Smith, W. Eugene Smith. His Photographs and Notes, Aperture, New York 1969.
4 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf 1995.

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company had said to its sales people that if they sold a certain amount of goods, they could
have their picture in the New York Times. About 5,000 did, so you opened the New York Times
and it gave you an instant headache because they had printed all those tiny pictures on a
huge spread. I woke up one morning and Burk Uzzle had pinned it up above my bed saying
‗this could be the layout for your book‘.5 The general feeling then was that there were far too
many pictures. Looking back on it now, I just don‘t agree.

JS: I don‘t know if you have seen any of those websites about the Iraq War put up by the
resistance and the anti-war movement; they often look like the spread you suggested with
hundreds of pictures in a grid…

PJG: I have seen these, yes…

JS: And as you click on each, it brings up an enlarged version of the image. Their power is in
their sheer repetition, of so many separate acts of oppression—US boots on Iraqi heads, for
example—and of wounding and death.

PJG: Life did a book on 9-11 where the cover is like that, all the faces of the victims, the size
of each hardly bigger than dots, making up an image of the Stars and Stripes.6

BL: It is hard for you to say, perhaps, but what is your view of the effect of Vietnam Inc., did
the book really shift the opinion of people at the time it appeared?

PJG: ‗The book that stopped the war‘ and all that…

BL: That was the Magnum story at the time.

PJG: But seriously, I think that it had a big effect. They did a huge print run and it sold out
in a couple of weeks. There was a great appetite for the book. Collier Macmillan was—and
still is—a very right-wing publishing house and the people who ran it were all very pro-war,
but there was this one guy who was the Vice-President whose son had been killed in
Vietnam and he said ‗let‘s do the book‘. The downside of that was that there was no support
from anyone and the antagonism I got from the production department was horrendous.

BL: They saw you as a traitor?

PJG: Yes, to give you an idea, if you have time, compare the text in the original version with
the reprint.7 The whole book was put together in upper New York State; Burk Uzzle had a
farm up there. I had finished correcting the proofs and put them on the bus to New York. I
phoned Collier Macmillan to tell them and they said ‗Oh, don‘t bother, we printed the book
yesterday‘. That was an example of how cavalier they were about the whole project. So in the
original version there were many grammatical mistakes that I corrected for the new edition,
though I didn‘t change the meaning of anything.

5 Burk Uzzle was a photographer with Magnum and President of the organisation 1979-80.
6 Editors of Life Magazine, One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001, Little, Brown and Company, New
York 2001.
7 Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam Inc., Phaidon Books, London 2001.

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JS: You hadn‘t been published before in the States, is that right?

PJG: No, nothing.

BL: Did the press immediately pick up on the book?

PJG: Oh yes, it was reviewed in the Times, the New York Times, Newsweek and many other
publications… The review in Time was pretty positive; the one in Newsweek was outrageous
saying I was obviously some kind of lunatic. It said: how dare he suggest that these brave
ARVN soldiers are off to loot and rape in Cambodia?8 That‘s exactly what they did—I know
because I was there. And then they talked about a picture of a man who was about to be
tortured and killed; and again, how could I write such dreadful things?

JS: You talk in one interview about how during Tet you photographed a man who was
showing you his wounded child as you walked in step over a bridge.9 Were there other times
when your subjects, whether US or ARVN troops or civilians, actively contributed to the
pictures? Were their times when they stopped you taking pictures?

8Ibid., pp. 38-9.

9Vietnam Inc., p. 150; see Susan D. Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat, Basic
Books, New York 1989, p. 355-6.

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PJG: The only time I can remember being stopped was in an officer‘s mess when a young
female dancer hired to entertain the men started feeding them Pretzels in a rather original
way.

The man crossing the bridge is also the only occasion I can recall of anyone contributing to a
picture. Most of the time the Vietnamese acted the fool in front of the camera. I remember
after a month ‗in country‘ I wrote to a friend that I could publish a book on palmistry –
children automatically lifted their hands in front of the lens whenever I put the camera to my
eye. However, when people were scared, they tended to ignore the camera.

JS: I know that you were not facing formal censorship but in general did you find restrictions
about how many images you were able to publish and what rules did people lay down as you
photographed them?

PJG: There were no rules. Anything went, there was nobody telling me what I could and
couldn‘t do. Once I had my little card that said I was a journalist, I could get on and off
helicopters, people would feed me when I was in the field. I was very lucky because just by
pure chance I met a guy who worked for the CIA. What happened was that in the
‗Continental Shelf‘ as we used to call it, the place where everyone went for drinks after the
daily briefing, I saw him trying to get a Nikon motor-drive to work. The Nikon motor drive
was destined to make you believe in a higher power because it was almost impossible to get
them to work. But I knew how to fix them. I fixed his and he was very grateful. He
explained that he was in charge of communications at the CIA and his job was to Xerox
field reports that came in and send them off to the various departments. So I would meet
him most weeks and he would hand me any reports that the CIA had written about me and
it was wonderful stuff: ‗This correspondent is of the astonishing opinion that we generate
refugees—keep an eye on him!‘

So although I was never conscious of being followed or watched, obviously I was. But the
main problem was not so much what I did but what got published. They had a very efficient
system; the organisation was called JUSPAO (Joint United States Public Affairs Office) that
got copies of every newspaper and magazine published in America shipped to Saigon. So
they would check up whether a correspondent had a ―positive attitude‖ to the war or not. In
my case after a few months, they started to get suspicious because I wasn‘t publishing
anything and they started to ask whom I was working for. I had to send telegrams to
Magnum saying that I had to get something published to allay their suspicions. So Magnum
did in fact get me two assignments and once those pictures were published, I was not longer
considered suspect. Those stories were relatively positive, in a sense.

JS: They put your pictures into a pro-war frame?

PJG: It was mutual I would say. One story was about Marines looking after refugees, which
was obviously pro-war on one level, though they were not particularly nice to the refugees
and the story did produce some critical pictures. The other was about a mobile inflatable
hospital that could be shipped to a battle scene, very similar to those huge inflatable
structures you see in New York a lot nowadays, where they play tennis. I did that story for
Look magazine. It legitimised me, so I wasn‘t looked on as some MI6 plant.

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JS: As the war went on and you continued to publish work, did that change?

PJG: No, because hardly any of the work was published. In those days, Magnum was two
fiefdoms, Paris and New York. Paris was run by Marc Riboud who thought that I as a
foreigner had no right whatsoever to be poking my nose into legitimate French foreign
affairs. New York was run by Burt Glinn, who was a very interesting man insofar as his
parents were solid Communists of the John Reed era, so Burt went exactly the opposite way.
He was convinced I was just some kind of Commie and it was very easy for him to get the
office to push the work of some photographers and neglect others.

JS: So when the book appeared, it was a bombshell.

PJG: Absolutely, for everyone, including the people in Vietnam. I remember a wonderful
Welshman called John Morgan who used to write for the New Statesman. He wrote, ―I was in
Vietnam, I hung out with Philip quite a bit and never once saw him take a picture!‖ Though
generally, I didn‘t hang out with the press. I lived with a Vietnamese family for much of the
time.

JS: Was this a usual thing for a photojournalist to do? Who were they and did they add to
your understanding of the country?

PJG: Most photojournalists rented apartments or lived in hotels. In my case the reason was
primarily economic. The husband was a professor and the family were staunchly anti-
communist, so I got to hear the latest gossip about the war from the side of the bourgeoisie.

I tried to be as low key as possible. In fact, on one occasion, I had become a non-person. I‘d
met this extraordinary journalist who had a fool-proof conspiracy theory about what was
really happening in Vietnam. He told me that the following morning there would be a
demonstration, the police would drag a young student into a building and then her body,
covered in blood, would be handed back, resulting in the students going on the rampage.
Anyway, it was highly structured; the girl they were going to throw out was not the same girl
but a corpse they had found the day before. Sceptical as always, I went along and everything
happened exactly as he said, it was almost as if he‘d organised the thing himself. So I found
myself in the middle of this melee, in which everybody, including the foreign press, was
getting the shit beaten out of them—all except me. An AP photographer, who was rather
wisely standing down at the end of the street with a long lens, captured the moment and he
got an amazing scene of everyone being kicked and punched and me in the middle with a
28[mm lens] shooting away untouched. Afterwards, when somebody saw the photograph,
they were on their way to the American Embassy with a print to complain that the CIA was
being far too obvious. At the last minute someone said: ‗That‘s Phil! He‘s Welsh, he couldn‘t
be in MI-anything‘. Even to this day I don‘t know why I was unharmed, because the Dutch
Life photographer, Co Rentmeester, ran up as I was going into a school building to
photograph some students. A policeman stopped him, while I was allowed in. He
complained, ‗I‘m Life magazine and if he can go in, why can‘t I?‘ The policemen grabbed
Co‘s camera and smashed off his 200mm lens with his truncheon. It was one of those
strange, strange things that happened; but the point of telling the story is that no one knew
my identity. I was unfamiliar enough not only to Americans who were going to report me to

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the Embassy for being CIA, but to the Vietnamese who were equally confused. So keeping a
low profile had really paid off.

JS: Were journalists often attacked?

PJG: Not by the NLF. There was a time in Hue, during the Tet Offensive, when I was in an
alleyway with a US Marine. We were waiting to move quietly shortly after dark to a new
position so that the NLF soldiers would not know where we were. The Marine was a large
man wearing a flak jacket with a raised collar that protected his neck, so only a small part of
his face showed above the jacket and beneath his helmet. He lifted his arm to wipe his brow
and suddenly the contents of his chest were spilling over me. Because of his size, there was a
gap at the side of his flak jacket and the sniper had put a bullet in there. He could have shot
me at any time, but I had long hair, no weapons and was carrying cameras, so he didn‘t waste
the bullet.

JS: The NLF used their spies to find out where journalists were going and went out of their
way not to harm them.10

PJG: I don‘t know about that, but it‘s true that they would not deliberately target journalists.

BL: Why was that? Because they knew they were against the war?

PJG: No, I would say that 89 per cent of the journalists there were completely in favour of
the war; another 10 per cent approved, but disagreed with US tactics; and a tiny number
(Catherine Leroy and myself, really) were totally opposed to it.11 The authorities on the other
side knew that it was in their interest to have the circumstances of the war exposed, even
with those odds.

BL: But you were barely published?

PJG: True, but lots of others were. I think, looking back on it all, as Ho Chi Minh would say,
from every disadvantage something positive emerges. I think if Magnum had been
enthusiastically promoting the pictures I shipped and getting them published it‘s possible
that the authorities in Saigon would have made life difficult for me. And perhaps I would
never have got the pictures I finally ended up with. I didn‘t get one single picture published
in any French newspaper or magazine during the whole war. And best spread was in, of all
places, the Weekend Telegraph magazine and that only happened because John Ansty, the
editor and the art editor were away and some student laid out the whole story. So little
happened to alert the authorities.

GVK: Did you make the book out of frustration that you couldn‘t get published?

10 Tim Page, Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side, ed. Doug Niven/ Chris Riley, National
Geographic, Washington, DC 2002, p. 46.
11 Catherine Leroi was a French photojournalist who worked in Vietnam from 1966. She edited Under Fire:

Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam, Random House, New York 2005.

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PJG: Not really, no. The single biggest mistake that a photographer can make is to believe in
the profession, to believe in magazines and newspapers. When that happens, you have
already failed. One must work first and foremost to satisfy oneself. And in my case I always
knew my goal was a book on the war. I know so many colleagues who, now that the
business has contracted, are learning Photoshop, scanning for other people or going into
interior decorating, because they believed in Life magazine. What‘s Life magazine now? Four
pages slipped into a newspaper somewhere in America—it‘s a disgrace. So the secret is to
have a passion, stick to that passion and ignore the rest.

JS: Can I ask you about the style of the pictures? A lot of them seem to be taken with quite
wide-angle lenses; you mentioned a 28mm lens earlier, did you have anything wider than that
and were you playing with those distortions, or was it rather a matter of necessity?

PJG: The vast majority of the pictures were taken with a 35. I could probably tell you what
lens each picture was taken with. There are certainly some pictures there taken with a 200
and a lot with a 105. I used to carry a very tiny bag; a couple of Leicas, one with a 28 and
one with a 35. A Nikon with a 105 and one with a 200; and I had a spare 28 for the Nikon
and a 21 for the Leica. Very few pictures were shot on the 21. In general, my feeling is that
when you look at a picture, you should never really be conscious of what lens it was taken
with. I don‘t have the genius of Cartier-Bresson who did it all on a 50. With something like
that US Marines tended a wounded troop member]12, I would have shot that on a 105, partly
because with moments like that, you don‘t want to be on top of them with a 28, you want to
give them a little distance.

There are virtually no cropped pictures—one or two. The picture of the people roped
around the neck is cropped, not so much because of my ineptitude but because the horizon

12 Vietnam Inc., p. 127.

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is at an angle.13 The early picture of the woman with a sickle is also cropped a bit to get rid a
light area in the background.14 But in general they are all full frame.

BL: And in principle, you don‘t allow other people to crop your pictures.

PJG: No, no. And in America one can be prosecuted for such deeds.

JS: In terms of printing them, did you do a lot of work, dodging and burning…

PJG: Yes, indeed. Though not in any way to distort the reality but certainly in Vietnam one
of the big problems is that people wear those big hats for a reason, and that is to keep off
the sun, and the difference between the top and the underneath of the hat is something like
five stops. In my darkroom you will find lots of sheets of black paper with different sized
triangles cut out, trying to burn some detail in those hats!

JS: The photographs are printed in a quite contrasty way; I suppose I am trying to get at the
aesthetic choices you are making as well as the political ones and how you see them match
up, if you think that they do.

PJG: I have always tried to print in a fairly dramatic way if it fits the subject matter. I have
printed pretty consistently and have not got darker or lighter as I‘ve got older.

JS: In terms of photographers who you looked to at the time you were working, who were
the ones who meant most to you.

PJG: It‘s boring to say, but obviously Cartier-Bresson is always the photographer one thinks
of in terms of those big influences. I suppose some of that drama, that amazing drama, that
one gets with Eugene Smith‘s printing techniques rubbed off along the way. What is
interesting about Vietnam Inc. is that between a quarter and a third of the pictures were
originally in colour.

JS: Really! I was going to ask if colour ever tempted you…

13 Vietnam Inc., pp. 52-3.

14 Vietnam Inc., pp. 6-7.

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PJG: They were converted into black and white.

BL: Why?

PJG: Very early on there was an operation that took place, the pictures are in the book, of
something called Cedar Falls in an area known as the Iron Triangle and I photographed it, I
think, very well.15 Life laid it out over eight pages, so suddenly I was going to be rich. Then
Magnum cabled me with the disastrous news that the magazine had some colour advertising
and asking if I shot any colour. I said no, so they ran three pages in colour by a stringer, but
none of mine.

That‘s in colour [picture of dead girl shot from a US helicopter].16

JS: Tim Page was there shooting the same scene in colour and of course published it in
colour.17

PJG: I actually did print it in colour for the first time about a month ago for the Sunday Times
exhibition.

BL: Is this the time when Ian Berry also did a lot of colour to black-and-white conversion,
for he has many famous pictures that are known in black and white though shot in colour?18

PJG: I think that‘s right. We used to hang out together in the old days. You see, my
pharmaceutical training was useful. When I used to run Magnum, I made sure we made

15 Vietnam Inc., pp. 84-91.

16 Vietnam Inc., pp. 118-19.
17 ‗Twelve-year-old girl mini-gunned by U.S. choppers in the abattoir near Y-Bridge, mini-Tet, Saigon ‗68‘, in

Tim Page, Tim Page’s Nam, Thames and Hudson, London 1983, p. 105.
18 Ian Berry is a Magnum photojournalist, best known for his work in South Africa. Among his books is Living

Apart: South Africa Under Apartheid, Phaidon, London 1996.

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black-and-white copies of all the colour work that came in and those copies were usually
good enough to make press prints and even sometimes exhibition prints. Generally for
exhibitions you need to go to the original slide and make a 4x5 negative from it. I did
something that few people would do, which was to use a lot of filters to change the
relationship between the tones. Also I used to get a Beutler two-part developer from
Germany so that if I had a very contrasty image I could develop it with essentially two
different developers to reduce the contrast. A lot of my big exhibition prints were made
from those 4x5 negatives.

JS: You were never tempted to publish in colour?

PJG: Though I started shooting a lot of colour after that incident, the only time they were
published was in Zoom magazine in Paris, a large format photo magazine, who wanted images
of Vietnam in colour.

JS: You were not inclined to use colour for Agent Orange, which you worked on for so many
years?19

PJG: No, it was tempting at times because many of the earlier images were in colour and
they were good colour in as much as they were well-lit Kodachromes. Using a slow film
meant carrying those big heavy flashguns, powerful enough to bounce off ceilings so that the
light doesn‘t look like flash. They converted well to black and white so in the end, it seemed
more consistent to do the whole book in monochrome.

JS: Did you use flash a lot?

19 Philip Jones Griffiths, Agent Orange: ‘Collateral Damage’ in Viet Nam, Trolley Ltd, London 2003.

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PJG: Only when I was using colour. In fact, in Vietnam Inc. there is only one solitary picture
taken with flash. When I went back to Vietnam in 1980, I had to shoot colour and that was
all done on Kodachrome. Ceilings are usually very black in Vietnam so to be able to bounce
the light I had to use fairly large heavy flashguns, especially as I wanted to shoot quickly in
bursts of three. You know, Kodak scratches the first one, Magnum loses the second and the
third you keep. Photographers have it easy nowadays because digital cameras deal so well
with low ambient light.

The early wartime colour pictures are almost all on Ektachrome 64, which I used to process
in Saigon, but when it comes to getting ultimate quality, Kodachrome wins every time. And
when I scan Kodachromes I can always make them look like Ektachrome.

GVK: An important question for me is that, when I spent time in Iraq, for a long time many
people didn‘t want to compare the situation in Iraq to that in Vietnam. Being there, I found
out that the most astonishing thing was that there was nothing for the Americans to relate to
in Iraq, there was a different culture—there are not even bars. When it came to it, the
essence of my stay was the attitude: forget winning hearts and minds, the Iraqis will never
like you, they may as well fear you. Does that compare with what you found in Vietnam?

PJG: There are obvious similarities with Vietnam, although they are never identical. There
are more parallels, paradoxically, with the Algerian war where the FLN discovered very
quickly that there was no way to beat the French army but they could create a civil war with
huge numbers of deaths so that people related all their problems to the invaders. I think that

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there are many complex layers; the main difference is that Vietnam, despite what the
Americans said, was a united country. Modern Iraq is of course a British invention.

JS: In your text in Unembedded, you have some hard things to say about photojournalists who
through the embedding system have to live and work with single army units.20 What do you
think are the prospects for photojournalism in this kind of war when, compared to Vietnam,
there is both a good deal more control for those journalists who are embedded and also far
more danger for those who are not?

PJG: It‘s obvious that the US forces killed the TV journalist Terry Lloyd because he was not
embedded.21 I was very impressed when I heard Michael Weisskopf talk last night (he was
the journalist who was in a Humvee with [James] Nachtwey when a grenade was thrown into
the vehicle; he picked it up to throw it out but not before it took his hand off). He has
written a book that is essentially a condemnation of being embedded, saying that the amount
of control of journalists in Iraq has been the greatest of any conflict.22 On the psychological
level, control through the embedding system worked amazingly well for America and he
goes on to explain how: when you do everything with a small group, you go along with
them, there is a friendship that builds up; and in his case, he is the first and only journalist to
be treated at the Walter Reed Medical Centre; he was treated as a combatant, not as a
journalist. He felt that he may have won but journalism lost. (And after the recent
revelations about treatment at Walter Reed his achievement may have been Pyrrhic victory!)

BL: The Abu Ghraib pictures were taken by soldiers themselves and even in Vietnam, a lot
of soldiers took photographs—of atrocities and these are still around, though these were
never published.

PJG: I remember once this guy coming to me, elbows in the mud, bullets flying overhead,
saying to me, ‗I‘m going to Hong Kong on my R&R, I want to buy the new Nikon…‘ I said:
‗I can‘t persuade you not to buy it as long as you also promise to also buy a Konica C35,
which is a little tiny film camera and carry it with you at all times and photograph everything
that you see.‘23 That‘s what your grandchildren will want to see. If you are going to buy for
$1000 dollars (which was a lot of money in those days) a complete SLR system, you are
never going to take it into the field with you. I‘ve never seen atrocity pictures taken by
soldiers. I have seen severed heads pictures and other things like that, but they were taken by
photojournalists with units. The truth is that people take far more pictures now than they did
thirty-five years ago.

JS: The many Vietnam veterans‘ sites carry lots of innocuous pictures taken by soldiers.
Michael Herr and various others claim in their memoirs that the taking of atrocity

20 Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/ Kael Alford/ Thorne Anderson/ Rita Leistner, Unembedded: Four Independent
Photojournalists on the War in Iraq, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont 2005.
21 Terry Lloyd, an ITN journalist, was killed in Basra in 2003; in October 2006, an Oxfordshire coroner‘s court

ruled that he had been unlawfully killed.

22 Michael Weisskopf, Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57, Henry Holt and Co., New York 2006.
23 The Konica C35 was an inexpensive but well-made compact 35mm rangefinder camera, first manufactured

in 1968.

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photographs by the soldiers was pretty systematic, rather in the way that trophy hunting was
carried out.24

PJG: The skull on the tank,25 that was quite common. But ‗systematic‘ I very much doubt. So
few soldiers had cameras and in those days there was no tradition of snapping away. I think
Michael was wrong. I worked on him for a long time and I take credit for the end of Full-
Metal Jacket, for which Michael wrote the script. You see, Michael came to Vietnam
convinced he was going to be the Ernie Pyle of the Vietnam War, and write wonderful
stories about brave soldiers doing wonderful things.26 So I realised I had a lot of work ahead
of me. The thing that really got through to him: I kept saying how brilliant the Vietnamese
were on a psychological level and they always tried to make sure that whenever Marc Riboud
went to North Vietnam to photograph the anti-aircraft guns, it was always women who were
firing them. Whenever they released pictures of captured American pilots, it was always a
woman leading them away. There‘s one famous picture of a huge American and a tiny little
woman behind him with a rifle. Hanoi always understood the stuff about the Marines
marching up and down, gun in one hand the other holding their balls, singing ‗this is my
weapon, this is my gun, this one‘s for shooting, this one‘s for fun‘. The Vietnamese
understood that so well, to have the Americans‘ testosterone-driven finest shot down and
captured by women. And in Full Metal Jacket, the Marines find that their deadly opponent is a
woman.

JS: The very last part of the film is also close to your book, because the Marines are
marching through the devastated landscape, singing about Mickey Mouse and the central
message of Vietnam Inc. is that all this was done to make the world safe for consumerism.

PJG: Indeed.

JS: Could we talk about Agent Orange?

BL: …and your commitment to go back to Vietnam year after year.

24 Ref Herr.
25 Ref.
26 Ernie Pyle was a Pulitzer Prize-winning Second World War correspondent, known for this empathy with US

troops, who was killed in 1945 on the island of le Shima near Okinawa.

15
PJG: As Gilles Peress said, ‗He‘s obviously not a war photographer. They don‘t go back
twenty-five times after the war‘s ended.‘ There were all these rumours about babies being
born with no eyes and I thought it would make an amazing image. But whenever I went to
Catholic orphanages, because they would always keep such babies alive, I was never allowed
in, so I became convinced that an order had gone out that these kids should not be
photographed. After the war, I went back and found them. It is one of the most disgraceful
episodes in American history. Today all of us have dioxin in our bodies and it‘s killing us—it
does not respect borders and there‘s no such thing as a permissible dose. One would
therefore think that America would seize the opportunity afforded by Vietnam to do some
basic research in the hope of finding a cure. Vietnam is the perfect place to look because it
has ethnically identical people who were separated by a line drawn on a map. The South was
sprayed, the North was not, so there is a built in control group. There are a lot of Agent
Orange kids in the North but every single one of them comes from a parent who fought in
the South or drove a truck along the Ho Chi Minh trail. There is still no definitive answer
about for how many generations these deformities will continue or by what mechanism they
are transmitted. The situation is confused by the fact that people are still ingesting large
quantities of dioxin because there are hotspots all over South Vietnam contaminating the
ecosystem. Of course, the Americans won‘t touch the problem on the grounds that they
could be considered liable.

JS: Though they compensated their own servicemen.

PJG: If you are an American, you will get money, few questions asked. The widow of my
friend Greg Davis, who died three years ago, out of curiosity, wrote to the Veterans‘
Administration who promptly paid her compensation.

BL: Is there any chance that your own cancer is related to this?

PJG: I‘ve always said no. But there is a picture in the book where I was obviously in the
middle of a cloud of spray, so I am sure I have a lot of dioxin in my system. Also, when I

16
lived with a Vietnamese family it was in downtown Saigon, there were no trees there because
the military used discarded 44 gallon Agent Orange drums, which always had a few litres left
in the bottom, for storing gasoline. When their vehicles burned that mixture, the dioxin was
released, killing the trees, and we breathed it all the time.

JS: Are there people in the US pushing for compensation for the Vietnamese?

PJG: Absolutely there are and there is a big court case proceeding. We lost the first round;
someone said because the judge was so pissed off at getting so many copies of my book! The
second round is supposed to happen towards the end of the year or the beginning of the
next.

JS: Do you have a sense that the book gave impetus to the campaign?

PJG: Oh, absolutely. The interesting thing about the book is that there was a spike in sales
when it was first published and then it sank into oblivion. But over the last couple of years,
sales have been ticking up and up and each month is ten per cent better than the one before,
which means it is being driven by word of mouth.

JS: In a way, it seems like a companion volume to Vietnam Inc., the use of text is similar…

PJG: What do you think of Vietnam at Peace?27 It isn‘t doing very well though it is moving
slowly but consistently. It is not as stark an issue as Agent Orange.

JS: In Vietnam Inc., you were able to say something that sounded simplistic but also somehow
carried a ring of truth: that the war seemed to be a way to divide the virtuous from the
corrupt Vietnamese. But now such judgements can‘t hold.

PJG: I think that what has encouraged me is that in the toning down of the excesses that
happened after the war, if they are able to do that so effectively, there is no reason why they
cannot move on from what we see now which is a period of transition to something much
better. I didn‘t write much about it because I am not privy to it, but obviously there is a lot
of corruption and the usual panoply of social ills. It does boggle the mind that all those
people who sacrificed so much have been pushed to one side by the nouveaux riches, who
behave like the nouveaux riches everywhere.

JS: You wrote in Agent Orange that during the war you rarely saw acts of kindness between
Vietnamese but that since the war you had seen some repair of the social structures that had
been torn up by the conflict, in the care taken of the damaged children, for instance.

PJG: I think that I was struck throughout the 1980s by the way the Vietnamese cared for
one another and were kind to each other in a way that I never saw during the war years,
when everybody was just out for number one. But unfortunately as consumer capitalism
charges forward, you do see examples of people trampling over each other to get to the top.
It‘s just the nature of the economic system. However, the traditional ways of earning status
in Vietnamese society have not been eradicated completely, in fact on occasions they are

27 Viet Nam at Peace, Trolley Books, London 2005.

17
coming back, as cultural activities are being encouraged. At other times, though, it‘s hard to
tell the difference between Orange County and Ho Chi Minh City.

BL: You are going back to Cambodia next week. What are you going to do there?

PJG: The first thing is a workshop—I‘m going to teach young Cambodians how to take
pictures. A third of the time playing with my godchildren; a third of the time doing research;
a third of the time taking pictures. This will be my third trip this year.

Cambodia is also going through a transition to become a consumer society. It‘s happening
everywhere. The Murdoch media facilitate it. The thrall that it has over villages in India is
immense. They buy a generator, a satellite dish, a little black-and-white TV set and the whole
village sits there every night watching Sky. No one gets up in the morning to feed the
animals. There are a lot of ads. And, simply put, their message is: ‗leave your village and go
to the city‘. That man is guilty of ‗culturecide‘, if you only consider what he has done to
China…

JS: Do you see any hopeful elements in this general picture of the laying waste of indigenous
cultures by the mechanisms of capital?

PJG: The answer is that it looks pretty hopeless. I don‘t know where to look; I don‘t see
anyone who is stemming the tide. The horrible truth is that the only societies doing anything
about the problem are those intent on blowing us up. And their motivation for condemning
us is nothing to do with the destruction of cultures; indeed, the Taliban were quite capable
of doing it themselves. They have the effect of holding Western consumer capitalism at bay,
though not for the right reasons.

JS: Noam Chomsky in his introduction to the new edition of Vietnam Inc. says that the US
anti-war movement was unprecedented: that you had a large portion of the population
actually marching against their own nation and in support of its ‗enemy‘. About the current
Iraq war, he has also pointed out that never have so many people demonstrated against a war
before it took place. I wonder whether out of that process that you deplore comes a sense of
connection between different people, who increasingly communicate, travel, migrate and
share common experiences. May not that work against racism and the Westmoreland view
that certain peoples don‘t have the same view of life and death, that they don‘t feel grief as
deeply as we do, that finally it‘s OK to kill them?

PJG: Maintaining one‘s cultural identity does not rely on isolation. All societies have
benefited from interaction and have grown accordingly. However, such enlightenment
should happen in an organic way, not be imposed. America is determined to compel the rest
of the world to accept its version of consumer capitalism, not by kindly osmosis but by a
tsunami backed by force if necessary.

Certainly the opposition to a war that had not been declared was unprecedented in the
history of the world. I think that what happened once the war started was that essentially the
means of persuasion America has at its disposal were honed and put into top gear. As a
result you had large numbers of people wanting to put Bush back in power.

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JS: The problem there was that the Democratic opposition was not anti-war and not even
anti-torture. People had nowhere to go.

PJG: True, and Nader‘s numbers didn‘t go up appreciably. What has happened is that the
opposition to the war has taken a long time to build up. It takes time for people to discover
for themselves how they have been hoodwinked.

Geert van Kesteren is a photojournalist, a nominee of Magnum and the author of Why
Mister, Why? Iraq 2003-2004, Artimo, Amsterdam 2004 and Baghdad Calling: Reports from
Turkey, Syria and Iraq, Episode Publishers, Rotterdam 2008. Brigitte Lardinois is Senior
Research Fellow at the London College of Communication and is the editor of Magnum
Magnum, the 60th Anniversary book of Magnum Photos, Thames and Hudson, London 2007.
Julian Stallabrass is Reader in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art and his latest
book is Art Incorporated, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004.

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