QUINTESSENTIALLY
Go Ahead Punk, Take My Picture

© 2007 Quintessentially
September 2007

This is a man who has been on the front line for the best part of fifty years. Ever since his books Vietnam Inc and Agent Orange exposed the bitter truth about America's part in the Vietnam War, Philip Jones Griffiths has fought for what he calls veracity in photojournalism. He has worked in over 120 countries, covering numerous wars and risking his life repeatedly, for the sake of sincere reportage.

And yet Griffiths, tall and considerable, with a ring of white hair, black spectacles, twinkling eyes and a comforting voice, seems like the perfect avuncular figure. Except that he doesn't seem old. When he talks of his stories and his plans for the future - including a return to Cambodia, further exhibits, and a book of Britain from his most recent show, 'Middle Years' - it's easy to forget that he is battling cancer and conducting all projects between sessions of chemotherapy. He is 71 years old, living on one lung, and a lot of energy.

Born in Rhuddlan in Wales in 1936, Griffiths studied pharmacy before turning to photography. As a student he admired Robert Frank, William Klein and Henri Cartier-Bresson, founder of Magnum - the photojournalism co-operative that Griffiths would join in 1966 and head as President between 1980 and 1985. "Cartier-Bresson put it most succinctly," he says, "that as you discover the world outside you discover the inside, and the better the inside becomes the better you see the outside. It's an upward spiral."

Which is what Griffiths began to discover for himself, first in Britain, then Algeria in 1962 ("the war to cover"), Vietnam from 1966 and a myriad other conflicts including Northern Ireland, Sudan, Israel and Cambodia. In 1971, as Vietnam Inc sent shockwaves through the Western World and Griffiths was credited for presenting the truth about the soldiers who had been protecting him, the importance of veracity in war reportage became paramount to him. His was an unenviable position, working between aggressor and victim, soldier and civilian. No matter what he saw, he had to remain detached.

"Looking back on Vietnam, there was a feeling that I was observing it all, which I was, through the camera, but it was more as if I was in some kind of spaceship. I don't want to sound as if I was some godlike creature looking at these minions who were doing the wrong thing, but certainly I always felt very much apart from what was going on. I kept my distance. And certainly I did that professionally. I didn't hang out with other journalists. I did live some of the time, with a Vietnamese family."

Was he a spy? Or an ally? Whose side was he on? The man who was never in uniform and, in the Seventies, had long hair, was clearly not a soldier. But in Vietnam he was 'with' the Americans. Which at first meant, to the Vietnamese, that he was the enemy. Yet you only have to look at Griffiths' work from Vietnam to believe his misgivings about the war. Hiding that view from the Americans entailed some delicate thought. "I wanted them to assume that I was in some unhappy marriage, getting away from my wife, picking up a camera as an excuse. That's the impression I wanted to give JUSPAO (Joint United States Public Affairs Office) who were the people who would arrange trips to cover particular operations. You had to keep on their good side."

For all the horror Griffiths saw and photographed (Agent Orange being the obvious testament) he shrugs off the notion of post-traumatic stress syndrome and says he has never had a bad dream about Vietnam to this day. Instead he maintains an unapologetic sense of humour and humanity for situations so far removed from the acceptable. "I think Coppola's Apocalypse Now was close to the reality of Vietnam, because he certainly captured some of that madness. And there was so much madness. I was in a helicopter once with a Sergeant type. He was a bit older than most but he knew how that system worked. We were flying over an American base and he gets on the microphone and says, "OK guys, when you're back in New York, shop at Moe's!" And then one of the guys in the helicopter obviously said to the gunner, "Tell that fucker to stop using that thing - we'll get into trouble!" So he said, "OK, no problem, opened this pack of cards which said, "Shop at Moe's!" and just scattered them out of the window of the helicopter… It was that kind of madness that had a surrealistic quality to it."

What Griffiths is less ready to accept than the reality - or surreality - of war is inaccurate representation. "Colour photography is in many ways antithetical to what photography does best. Especially if you aim to capture this iconic image - which invariably involves good composition and which draws people in aesthetically. It's that sort of interaction that takes place in a very spontaneous way. It's a photograph that's in our passports, not a drawing, because people actually believe pictures. The more it looks as if the photographer was 'not there' the better the picture. The truth comes out when people aren't responding to the camera and they're carrying on as if the camera wasn't there. What happens in colour - unless you're gloriously colour-blind and you don't notice - is you control. If I was to go click right now I'd realise that those red books up there on the shelf would be competing with you and if I was a film director I would replace them with grey books or maybe blue ones to make your hair look more golden. But a still photographer at his best is not a movie director. A movie director is recreating whereas the photography director gets it raw the first time.

Shooting in colour, you move around, you sometimes use wide-angle lenses to make the offending colour smaller, or you use a telephoto lens to cut it out. Your preoccupation with making the picture work in colour terms means you forget what the original intent was. When magazines turned to colour photography, so often the content - the meaning - of the pictures decreased."

The reality of colour photojournalism hit Griffiths hard in Vietnam after Life retracted a commission which would have supported him there a further year. After that, reluctantly but on the insistence of editors, he carried a few colour rolls on him at all times.

But he got his own back. Griffiths the pharmacist developed his own method of converting his colour images back into black and white so that even when he had to shoot in colour for commissions he would convert the rolls later on into black and white for his books. "You might say the reason we black and white photographers are in business is that we shoot away and at the end of the year we've got twelve great iconic images. Well, for a colour photographer to achieve the same success rate he's got to shoot for 10 years. So it becomes very difficult - self-defeating almost - to produce the same. You can do it but you've got to live to be 300 years old."

Predictably, the concept of digital photography does not sit well with Griffiths either. "Digital manipulation is the death of photography!" And clearly, in his opinion, the ultimate low to which a Magnum photographer could stoop. "I was just on a panel in Turkey and I explained that this was happening in Magnum and I said, 'To me, the analogy would be if the vegetarian society were to welcome in meat eaters.' And a person from Magnum said, 'Oh, but these pictures are very hard to find, they're hidden away in a database!' I said that was like a vegetarian society saying, 'Welcome, all meat eaters, but if you really insist on eating raw pork sandwiches you've got to do it under the table.'

A couple of years ago we voted to allow manipulated pictures into Magnum so we now have photographers doing the ultimate desecration, not only of a photograph, but of the whole concept of photography. It is beyond belief that we would allow that. When I joined Magnum, if somebody faked a picture in any way, even by asking someone to "Turn here!" or "Move there!" that would be grounds for eviction on the spot. But now of course it's gone so much the other way that people are making photographs on the computer with bits of pictures and joining them up."

While Griffiths himself has moved with the times - he has replaced his dark room with a computer - he ensures that his work retains the integrity it always did. "Essentially what we do here is that my daughter Katherine scans the negative or slide and then spots it. I then do on the screen with that image exactly what I would do in the dark room. That, to me, is the line."

What with the current situation in Iraq, as well as every less documented war, you can appreciate Griffiths' crusade for candid reporting and thorough coverage (no small demand for any war journalist). "For me, personally, never has photography been more important than it is today. There are various reasons to be a photographer. One is to try to change a situation. Another is to produce a historical document. And then there's the third reason, and that is, I think, the personal one, which is what I'm talking about. The one where you say, look, as a result of going to Darfur I understand more now about the mechanisms of aid and the problems of groups within a country that are opposed to the main religion of their country. In a sense it becomes very much a self-educating process. And that's not bad! In fact it's great."

I get the sense that Griffiths is still educating himself, even today.



Agent Orange: Collateral Damage is published by Trolley Books