Philip Jones Griffiths, War Photographer, Dies at 7
Philip Jones Griffiths, a crusading photojournalist whose pictures of civilian casualties and suffering were among the defining images of the war in Vietnam, died on Wednesday at his home in London. He was 72.
The cause was cancer, said Richard Hughes, an actor and activist who befriended Mr. Griffiths in Vietnam.
The book that grew out of Mr. Griffiths’s reporting there, “Vietnam Inc.,” is considered a classic, and its publication in 1971 helped turn public opinion against the war. Its harrowing pictures — of a blackened burn victim, a thin woman’s body splattered with blood, a South Vietnamese boy in soldier’s fatigues, his head tiny beneath a huge helmet — were the kind not often seen in newspapers. And Mr. Griffiths, a pacifist passionately opposed to the war, never considered himself a traditional war photographer.
“I saw myself as producing a historical document,” he said in a 2002 interview on the Web site Musarium.com, adding: “Journalists should be by their very nature anarchists, people who want to point out things that are not generally approved of.”
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The cause was cancer, said Richard Hughes, an actor and activist who befriended Mr. Griffiths in Vietnam.
The book that grew out of Mr. Griffiths’s reporting there, “Vietnam Inc.,” is considered a classic, and its publication in 1971 helped turn public opinion against the war. Its harrowing pictures — of a blackened burn victim, a thin woman’s body splattered with blood, a South Vietnamese boy in soldier’s fatigues, his head tiny beneath a huge helmet — were the kind not often seen in newspapers. And Mr. Griffiths, a pacifist passionately opposed to the war, never considered himself a traditional war photographer.
“I saw myself as producing a historical document,” he said in a 2002 interview on the Web site Musarium.com, adding: “Journalists should be by their very nature anarchists, people who want to point out things that are not generally approved of.”