The Briton, a striking and offbeat figure of the conflict, who inspired a character from the film “Apocalypse Now” by Francis Ford Coppola, died on August 24, at 78 years old.
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“Save me, I’m a rocker” had written Tim Page on his helmet during the Vietnam War. From the British photographer, posterity will undoubtedly retain the character as much as the images: Tim Page certainly marked the War of Vietnam by publishing in the press of the time without eyeshadows, taken as close to the fights, but above all he Leave the memory of a flamboyant trompe-la-mort, injured several times, mixing in an explosive cocktail the war, the drug and the rock’n’roll-to the point of inspiring the character of the crazy and smashed journalist played by Dennis Hopper in the film Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola. The photographer died on August 24, at 78, in Bellingen, Australia, following liver cancer.
If the Vietnam War came to model all his life, Tim Page nevertheless fell into photojournalism by chance. Born on May 25, 1944, in Tunbridge Wells, in the United Kingdom, he left his parents in the suburbs of London at the age of 17, with a letter saying that he leaves “for Europe, or maybe the Navy, and from there to the world “. The young man does all jobs and all kinds of traffic in Asia, before arriving in Laos, in 1963, where he started working for the United Press International (UPI) agency. He learned the photo on the job, and settled in Saigon for several years to cover the independent war, by publishing his photos in Time and Life magazines, Paris Match and the AP and UPI agencies – images full of fury and red dust, in the middle of the wounded evacuation and next to the terrorized civilians taken in the fights.
“We lived like the soldiers, in primitive conditions, will tell the photographer to the world in 1998. We suffered with them. Taking images was surviving. It was impossible to calculate our chances of staying alive. Photographing someone ‘One with a hole in the throat, it’s a bit perverse. Korean soldiers accepted that we photograph unstunable tortures, but not an execution. War is more pornographic than a film. “
“Swinger on the edge of the void”
He shares his apartment in Saigon with another photographer, Sean Flynn, the son of the famous actor Errol Flynn, who has the same passion for the motorcycle and the music of the Mothers of Invention, which they listen to fully. “We were a small group made up of photographers, journalists and a few TV people who were often on the ground, who understood fear and horror, but who could still Swinger on the edge of the void,” said Tim page in The Guardian, in 2016. He sometimes left Vietnam to cover the Israeli-Arab war in 1967 or a Doors concert in New Haven (Connecticut State), which earned him to finish in prison after a plump, smashed, with the singer Jim Morrison.
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