Philip Jones Griffiths

Mar 24 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE CAME from a little country and saw through his boy’s eyes that its culture was threatened from outside.

This gave him a sympathy for every David facing every Goliath in the world.

And then, one day, he pushed the button on the family’s box Brownie camera and, in the photograph of his friend in a rowing-boat off Holyhead, he had held a tiny moment in history.

Many years later, in the sweating jungle, a Vietnamese soldier put a hood over this photographer’s head and stepped back to pull the trigger. But the bullet missed. Maybe it had just been a warning, a game.

Some thought the photographs taken by Philip Jones Griffiths, son of a railway manager and a district nurse from Rhuddlan, North Wales, shocked the American public so much that they helped end the Vietnam War.

In 1966, he arrived in Vietnam to photograph the quiet beauty of the rural life which he felt was threatened by the mechanisation adopted from America. Clearly this emotion rubbed close to his own experiences in an increasingly Anglicised part of Wales.

His own ideas were not greatly influenced by either communism or capitalism, but he felt for ordinary people whose lives were ruined by the big boys.

Inevitably the war and its terrible toll featured more and more, resulting in the publication of his book, Vietnam Inc. The mood of America was already moving away from the war, heightened particularly by revelations of the atrocities committed in the My Lai massacre of 1968.

Griffiths’s book swelled the ranks of the peace movement and were a point of reference for later movies such as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.

While at St Asaph Grammar School, Griffiths had taken photographs of local weddings and day-trippers to Rhyl, but on the advice of his parents, went to Liverpool University to study chemistry – as pharmacy provided a steady occupation.

However, when employed at Boots in Piccaddilly Circus, he started taking photographs of streets haunted by sunken ladies plying their trade for drugs. Soon these were published in the Guardian and the Observer.

Griffiths’ Vietnam work was distributed by the Magnum picture agency of which he became president in 1980.

Further books about Vietnam followed from Griffiths, who regarded marriage as a bourgeois institution, though he had two daughters.

Philip Jones Griffiths, photographer, born February 18, 1936; died March 19, 2008.