Presenting the inimitable Tim Page

The Vietnam War continues to exert a profound influence on the FCC, not least via the images that bedeck the walls of the Bunker. Last month the club saluted one of the era’s most distinguished photographers.

The Correspondent paid a brief tribute to the late British photographer Tim Page – who was best known for his images of the Vietnam War – last year following his death from cancer in August. But this June the Wall Committee took the opportunity to mount a comprehensive retrospective of his work.

e images almost didn’t need captions, with each supplying an eloquent testimony to the horror, futility and wastefulness of war.

Page su ered for his art, being wounded four times and narrowly cheating death. Physically and mentally, the war stayed with him for the rest of his life. He spent long years trying to ascertain the fate of a close friend, Sean Flynn, who was lost in action, and subsequently documented the fate of those maimed by landmines or Agent Orange. His book Requiem: By the Photographers who Died in Vietnam and Indochina was universally well received, and – poignantly – its photos are on permanent display in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

As drone footage on YouTube and similar media has made abundantly clear, the business of war reporting has since changed out of all recognition. Tim Page pursued his metier in the front line with no little heroism. We shall not see his like again. n

1 Page was one of the few Western photographers to accompany Korean troops on operations in Vietnam; the woman and children pictured here were caught up in a dawn raid near Bong Son in 1966.

2 Page was not so much close to the action as an intimate part of it, as this close-up of a wounded ol er be e fir a b comra e ampl demonstrates.

3 Bien Hoa, 1969. Page commented: “A chromatic colourisation of the lime’s white against the orange backdrop of a departing chopper’s rotar wash scrimmed the arrival of a surviving nun, rosary in hand, above an erstwhile enemy. anyway you framed it, you had death.”

4 Ambush aftermath near Duc Co Special Forces Camp, 1966.