The most celebrated reportage to come out the Vietnam War was Michael Herr’s Dispatches, rightly acclaimed as the most visceral journey into the dark heart of America’s first military defeat. But unlike all wars before it, Vietnam was a genuinely visual conflict, brought into the homes of the public via television and photojournalism. And among its most accomplished witnesses were two British photographers. The one everyone has heard of is Don McCullin, but his work was matched picture for picture by the Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths.
Jones Griffiths, who died in 2008, was credited with helping shift public opinion about America’s involvement in Vietnam when his book Vietnam Inc. was published in 1971. That work, which features many powerful images of GIs and civilians, South Vietnamese soldiers and Vietcong, is now subject to an exhibition at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, which owns a vast archive of his work including 150,000 slides and 30,000 prints.
Philip Jones Griffiths – A Welsh Focus on War and Peace puts on display images from Vietnam alongside other work from his career, plus his cameras and personal papers. These photographs, some tender, others bearing witness to great suffering, bristle with immediacy.