Interview with Philip Jones Griffiths

G.I. during urban fighting, Saigon, 1968. Photo by Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum.

Philip Jones Griffiths was born in Rhuddlan, Wales, in 1936. He studied pharmacy in Liverpool and worked in London as a part-time photographer for the Manchester Guardian. In 1961, he began freelancing for the Observer, moving to Central Africa and covering the Algerian war the following year. In 1966, he moved to Asia, where he photographed Vietnam until 1971. During this time Griffiths became involved with Magnum, a photographic co-operative owned by its photographer-members. In 1980, he moved to New York where he held the post of Magnum president from 1980 to 1985. Griffiths became famous for his 1971 book Vietnam Inc., which crystallized public opinion against the American war on Vietnam and prompted Henri-Cartier Bresson to call him the Goya of photojournalism. He has since published six books, including Agent Orange, which documents the effects of the eponymous chemical sprayed by the Americans on the children and grandchildren of Vietnamese and Cambodian farmers during the Vietnam War; and Dark Odyssey, a collection of his best work covering wars and conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Carmela Cruz: Some of the photographs you took of war and imperialism can incite both revulsion and compassion. These images of barbarity and misguided benevolence that humans inflict on others are striking. Yet no sooner have viewers formed uncomfortable conclusions about the human race than your captions help them back to the surface – even to the hilarity of zero-sum exertions at, say, the cultural hegemony imposed by one country on another by way of religious or economic domination. What does this say about the way you look at things – at truth, ultimately?

Woman injured by helicopter fire, Saigon, 1968. Photo by Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum.

Philip Jones Griffiths: I report on what I discover first hand. The great advantage of being a photographer is that second-hand impressions are avoided. While approaching subjects for the purpose of confirming preconceptions gains nothing, the fact remains that over time patterns do emerge.

Simply put, they are the "haves" exploiting the "have-nots." Greed manifests itself as the great motivator in world events. Capturing the excesses is never easy, and revealing the underlying machinations even less so.

My photography, unlike say, police photography, relies on emotion. I need to make the viewer laugh or cry, and sometimes both. Statistics are important, but it's a photograph of the anguish in the eyes of a starving child in Darfur that initiates the quest for a solution.

Cruz: You have covered more than 140 countries, their issues and peculiarities as well as their wars, conflicts and revolutions. Your friend of more than 30 years, New Yorker writer Murray Sayle, made an analogy between your childhood experience of seeing your native Wales violently altered with the onset of industrialization, and the United States’ war “on” Vietnam. These, he says, are both examples of how "a mechanized monster has despoiled an innocent landscape." How did this affect the way you framed the news? In your long career as a photojournalist, did this vision ever change?

Griffiths: I've always acknowledged my childhood experience of hegemony, and it has certainly heightened my ability to detect it around the world. My collective observations and experiences have on the whole confirmed my worldview. Great powers, especially America, are following a simplistic agenda that is transparent to all those who have functioning eyes and brains.

A casualty of Agent Orange. Photo by Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum.

Cruz: While Vietnam is one of the fastest growing economies among developing nations today, basic freedoms – of speech, religion, assembly – are still a dream for the majority of Vietnamese. Does this affect your views of Vietnam? Or, do you see it as the war carrying on, in a way, because of the deep, unhealed scars it has left on the land and its people?

Griffiths: Vietnam is complicated, and that is why my latest book on the country is over 300 pages long! The wartime destruction, the U.S. embargo, typhoons, and the cessation of aid from the collapsed Soviet Union have all contributed to what we find in the country today. Many aspects have caused Americans to declare that they won the war, because consumer capitalism reigns supreme. My observation is that some of the worse excesses are being ameliorated.

Cruz: Digital technology has sped up the process for visual journalism. What are the advantages on the part of the photojournalist, and on the public? Also, there's something elemental and incontrovertible in black and white photographs; somehow, the truth does not seem as elusive as people often make it to be. Your book, Dark Odyssey, leaves little room for variegated confusions. In color, photographs become somewhat more complex; truth takes on layers. Your feature on the dumpsites in the Philippines, for example, could also be taken as a rebuke to unbridled consumerism, poor government, and irreparable destructions to the environment. Or is this just a matter of preference?

Griffiths: Digital photography has its pros and cons. Instead of shipping 100 rolls of film to an editor to select the few that will get published, the photographer becomes the one who decides what the magazine should see by transmitting only the most relevant images. The down side with digital capture is that there is no negative to refer to when proving the authenticity of a dubious image.

The other aspect of digital photography is the democratization of image-gathering, and uncontrolled dissemination, the Abu Ghraib pictures being a prime example. To counter this, the powers-that-be are submitting the world to a tsunami of images on the principle that they will learn nothing as they drown.

I believe that black-and-white photographs possess a profundity absent from color. Empirical proof of this can be seen on Madison Avenue, where advertisers resort to black-and-white images to promote ‘serious’ subjects. On a more practical level, tackling color detracts from what photography does best – capturing those revealing moments between people without having to deal with fluorescent shirts at the edge of frame!

Cruz: Recently in Burma, the military generals, who have ruled the country for 45 years, cracked down on street demonstrations led by monks and students calling for change. As the world condemned the arrests and killings of protesters, the junta restricted internet use, stemming the flow of information, videos and photographs to the outside world. With this example in mind, how important are photographs in shaping the opinion of the public and world leaders?

Griffiths: The ‘power elites’ of the world hate information they cannot control. In America, the media is owned by conglomerates that do the bidding of the government – with a few notable exceptions. Like other countries, Burma cannot control the outflow of information, so the behavior of its fascistic regime is revealed. Burma's problem is that it has few friends; thus, it becomes fair game for self-righteous America, which condemns these atrocities while simultaneously welcoming to Washington the worst human rights violators on earth.

Cruz: Critics have elevated your best work to art. When do news photos become works of art, and the incongruous gain depth and the fleeting, timelessness?

Griffiths: Alas, nomenclature is sadly lacking in the field of ‘art’. Am I a news photographer? A press photographer? A photojournalist? An artist? I deplore the latter moniker because the word is so misused. For me, art is the melding of form and content, and as that is what I strive to do then perhaps ‘artist’ is correct. But I'm happy to be called a photojournalist!