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PROFILE

Tim Page has been on my list of photojournalists to interview for as long as I can remember. My desire to meet the “legendary Tim Page” – as he is oft referred to – was driven by a mixture

of curiosity – what was the wild child of war photogra-phy who inspired Dennis Hopper’s character in Apoca-lypse Now like in his late 60s? – and respect for

his incredible body of work that is far more extensive than just the Vietnam War photographs that made him infamous.

Over coffee I discover that Tim Page is delightfully eccentric, with an acerbic wit that marks the depth of his intelligence. He is funny and articulate; our interview moves along at a rocketing pace. Page

takes me from one continent to another, throwing details, names and places at me, digressing to add personal anecdotes before dashing to another memory. His language at once demonstrates his erudition and his love of the words “fuck” and “masturbation”, which he uses liberally to describe all sorts of scenarios. I can’t remember an interview when I’ve laughed, or blushed, so much.

Interviewing someone like Tim Page is tricky. There is already so much written about his Vietnam War days and triumphs such as the book Requiem that he and fellow war photographer Horst Faas published in 1997 as an ode to the 135 photojournal-ists who lost their lives in Vietnam and Indochina.

While I am still interested to hear Tim Page’s war stories first hand, I decide to focus on what he’s doing

Tim Page is one of the world’s legendary war photographers, and he’s still actively documenting the on-going aftermath of the conflict in south-east Asia. He’s also keen to pass on his knowledge and insights through teaching. Interview by Alison Stieven-Taylor.

The Zen Of Photography

“The best education you can have, photographically, is not go to school – it is to go out and take pictures and travel. Photography is not an academic subject. How do you teach it? I don’t know.”

Tim Page And

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PROFILE

now, which involves teaching as well as working in Cambodia on de-mining projects. He’s also been trawling through an archive that contains more than half a million photographs. And he’s still determined to get to the bottom of what happened to his mate and fellow photojournalist Sean Flynn (son of Errol), all those years ago back in Asia in 1970 when he disappeared without a trace.

The Photographer’s EyeThere are a lot of photojournalists turning their hand to teaching, and I imagine being taught by Tim Page would be an exhilarating experience for someone who is committed to understanding documentary photo-graphy. But the photographer’s eye – that intangible quality that makes one photographer

standout against many – is surely inherent? I throw that question to the maestro.

“In Vietnam I travelled with people like Eddie Adams [who was Page’s mentor], Horst Faas, Larry Burrows, Don McCullin, and on and on. It’s like being in the Court of the Crimson King in a sense. If you don’t pick up what they are doing and where they are pointing their fucking camera, you may as well leave. It was the hardest competition you could have, but if you couldn’t take as good a picture as they could, you didn’t get on the wire or in the magazine. So you had to pick up the osmosis. It is not just where you point the camera, it is understanding what’s going on. How do you teach life skills? How to function around people? How to make somebody who’s horribly fucked up and wounded feel reasonable? Who do you give a

cigarette to? Who do you give gum to? How do you handle yourself? I know what life skills are, it is some-thing amorphous. Life.

“The best education you can have, photograph-ically, is not go to school – it is to go out and take pictures and travel. Photography is not an academic subject. How do you teach it? I don’t know. I think you can mentor people, but not more than about four or five. The courses we do in Vietnam, we have five or six in each group and five or six mentors including Nick Ut.”

MentoringWhile the idea of university courses for photography irritate him, Tim Page has himself taught these classes in the past.

The Zen Of Photography

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PROFILE“My approach? The first thing I do is look around

the class. There’s 30 of them and the first thing I ask is, ‘How many of you have got a camera with you?’ One? Okay. The rest of you can fucking leave. Photographers carry cameras. If you don’t have a camera, fuck off. And I go through their contact sheets and pictures and I say, ‘That’s garbage’, ‘That’s absolute fucking rubbish’. Well, they have been used to platitudes and thinking they are going to pass and they expect mediocre work will get them decent grades…”

He continues, “When a student asks me for an extension or to give them another chance, I say, ‘Fuck

off, you’ve just failed’. There’s no second chance out there. I couldn’t, in the middle of the fucking Vietnam War say, ‘Excuse me, could you stop firing for a moment so I could reposition this guy and just move that fucking fighter bomber underneath, hold, hold, hold, hold… okay, thanks’. Wake up”.

He sips his coffee and grins. “Sorry, I am Jurassic Park,” he says.

Mentoring, on the other hand, is something Page finds more relevant to photojournalistic practice than a formalised university course. He tells me that he’s been mentoring young photographers since the early

2000s when he did a project for the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation. In 2009, the UN asked him to run a similar mentoring master class in Afghanistan with a small group of young photojournalists who were to cover the elections that year.

“At that time the UN didn’t have a permanent staff photographer in Afghanistan. In my mentoring group were four blokes – the oldest mid-30s and the youngest was Batoor. He was my top student, he’s got a good eye and was by far the best snapper. And there were two girls in their early twenties.”

As an aside, Batoor (Barat Ali Batoor) is the young

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refugee who filmed his attempt to reach Australia from Indonesia. His images capture the terrifying moments when the boat sank. The story appeared on SBS’s Dateline program last year and, subsequently, Batoor has been working to gain refugee status, which has now been granted. My story on Batoor’s photo essay – which documents the lives of those who are stranded in asylum limbo – will appear in this magazine later in the year.

Agent OrangeWe move on from Afghanistan to Cambodia, where Tim is currently engaged in several projects, including a land-resettling program with FINNMAP. The project was meant to last 21 days, but he is now into his fifth month. And while in Cambodia, a German aid organ-isation “…poached me from the Fins to work on a resettling project upstream on the Mekong”.

The week after our interview, Tim headed back to Cambodia to shoot the next phase of the German project. He was also in Phnom Penh in February, along with other veteran journalists, for the memo-rial dedication to the 37 foreign and Cambodian correspondents and journalists who died or went

missing between 1970 and 1975, including his mate Sean Flynn. Tim has been back to Vietnam and Cambodia so many times that he’s lost count. In 1980 he was in Vietnam “…when I first stumbled on the downstream effects of Agent Orange in terms of deformities and mental disabilities. We just drenched them in that shit didn’t we? We didn’t know how bad it was during the war – we drank the stuff and were covered in it. We didn’t know it was at all dangerous… no idea. In 1984, I came back to do the first book on the country after liberation, back to Saigon ten years after the end of the war. I started to go to the clinics and the hospitals and get involved, to see what was happening with the second, third, fourth generation children from Agent Orange.”

Tim Page’s images are a powerful historical record that gives another perspective to the ongoing toll of the Vietnam War and, for me, further reinforce the importance of the still photograph.

The Zen MomentI ask Tim what he thinks about the role of the still photograph in a world where everything is moving and images are transient.

“I think still photography is possibly the most Zen of expressions and that’s what it is to me. That 125th is the perfect Zen moment, it is like throwing a piece of clay onto a wheel or creating the perfect note and making the perfect brush stroke. When people come up to me and say, ‘I remember your picture of…’ And not just Vietnam – obviously I’ve been busy since then… I feel kind of a certain pride and pleasure. You can’t hang a strip of movie footage on the wall. One picture is it.”

Tim still shoots film, but what does he think of the digital imaging platform?

“I am virtually a complete Luddite. I can’t type. I am mathematically dyslexic, but I can figure it with shooting. In 2002 I got a Canon D60 and a couple of lenses. Then I was given a Nikon digital to do the Solomon’s intervention in 2003. I also made a little QuickTime movie. And I’ve been playing with the Fujifilm X-Pro1 in Cambodia which I like the feel of. But I still shoot film and have a Hasselblad XPan that I carry all the time. I am shooting less and less on it simply because everyone wants instant gratification and I can’t give them that with film. But I am going to do an architectural project on film.”

As we wrap up the interview, I ask him what his plans are once he’s finished the Cambodian projects.

“I could publish a book a year and still not use the same pictures,” he says. “But I am in my last semester. I’m 68. I find it harder and harder in the field… I’ve got three stents in my heart, a five-inch pin in my hip, one leg is shorter than the other, everything is working against me. It isn’t a whinge, it’s just reality. It is a young man’s game out there and to go and get pictures. I don’t want to fight 50 photographers with iPhones. I have no desire to be in that kind of cluster fuck. But I’ll keep going back to Asia. I love Asia because I learn about myself all the time.”

Alison Stieven-Taylor is an author and photographer based in Melbourne; her book, Rock Chicks, profiles the leading female rock stars from the 1960s. For more information visit www.realityillusion.com

“I think still photography is possibly the most Zen of expressions and that’s what it is to me. That 125th is the perfect Zen moment, it is like throwing a piece of clay onto a wheel or creating the perfect note and making the perfect brush stroke.”