He was wounded four times while covering the Vietnam war and inspired Dennis Hopper’s character in the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now..Arriving in Vietnam in 1965, at the age 20, renegade British photojournalist Tim Page would spend the next four years capturing the fighting with his camera, becoming one of the war’s most renowned and fearless lensmen..Known as much for his larger-than-life personality as for his intense and powerful combat photographs, Page died on Wednesday at his home in New South Wales, Australia. He was 78.. Tim Page's VietnamTim Page's Vietnam .The cause was liver cancer, said his longtime partner, Marianne Harris..According to The Washington Post, Timothy John Page was born May 25, 1944, in Tunbridge Wells, England..He was adopted several months after his birth and never learned the identity of his birth mother. His biological father was in the British navy when he was killed in the Second World War..His adoptive parents lived in Kent, where his father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker..At 17, he left a note telling his parents that he was “leaving home for Europe and perhaps navy and hence the world.”.He made his way from Europe to Pakistan and eventually Thailand, working in a brewery, as a cook and as a smuggler of hashish and cigarettes. He taught English and sold encyclopedias and lightbulbs, The Washington Post reported..In “Page After Page” — one of more than 10 books he published — Page said he could arrange drug deals in multiple languages by the time he was 18..He was working for the US Agency for International Development in Laos and taking pictures on the side when his photos of an attempted Laotian coup were published..He received a call from United Press International’s Vietnam bureau chief, asking, “Hey kid, would you like a job?” Forty-eight hours later, Page was in Saigon.. Tim Page's VietnamTim Page's Vietnam .“I’d heard about him even before I came to Vietnam (‘Look him up. If he’s still alive’),” journalist Michael Herr wrote in Dispatches, his powerful 1977 book about the Vietnam War..“I’d heard so much about him that I might have felt that I knew him if so many people hadn’t warned me, ‘There’s just no way to describe him for you. Really, no way.’ ”.A freelancer and a free spirit whose Vietnam pictures appeared in publications around the world, he was seriously wounded four times, most severely when a piece of shrapnel took a chunk out of his brain the size of an orange and sent him into months of recovery and rehabilitation, The New York Times reported..“I used to sit and scratch off my own blood and brains from the interstices of the Leicas,” Page wrote in 1988, “though they never looked really clean again.”.In Vietnam, Page rode his motorcycle to the front lines and climbed aboard helicopters to take photographs that showed the dust flying beneath the rotors, the desolation of dispossessed Vietnamese villagers, the gurneys laden with fallen soldiers..His pictures were featured in Life magazine, Time, Paris Match and other journals..When he returned from the battlefield, his house in old Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) was the headquarters for nonstop parties, fuelled by huge amounts of marijuana, LSD and opium, as rock albums blared at high volume..“What a great place to have a war,” Page later told the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Good-looking women, great food, beaches, the best dope.”. Tim Page's VietnamTim Page's Vietnam .Page was, in large part, the inspiration for the drugged-out, risk-taking war photographer played by Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now..In 1975, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner wanted to send gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to cover the final days of the Vietnam War with Page..Thompson, known for his rampant drug use and love of guns, turned down the offer, reportedly calling Page too wild even for him..If Page was “crazy and ambitious,” in Herr’s words, he also was a quick-learning, self-taught photographer with a deep-seated desire to portray the sorrow and futility of war..“Any war picture is an antiwar picture,” he told Vice.com. “I’m not saying photography stopped the Vietnam War,” he added, but “I think it contributed to swaying public opinion.”.Irreverent and cynical, he earned the respect of the grunts on the ground because he was close to their age and walked every muddy step alongside them..In 1965, when he was with a Special Forces detachment, the camp was attacked one night by the Viet Cong. Page shot and killed one of the intruders..“I have no feeling about it,” he told Vice magazine. “I should have feeling. It was just a really bad night. I had no choice. … I’ve never had to use a weapon again.”. Tim Page's VietnamTim Page's Vietnam .In 1966, after a grenade exploded near Page, he was taken to a hospital by his closest friend in Vietnam, the photographer Sean Flynn, the son of the movie star Errol Flynn..Fragments of the grenade were pulled from Page’s face. The next year, after the patrol boat was sunk beneath him and its captain was killed, Page left Vietnam to recuperate, The Washington Post reported..After his wounds had healed, he covered the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War before returning to Vietnam in 1968..In that same year, he would be arrested for disturbing the peace, along with Jim Morrison of the Doors, during a melee at a concert in New Haven, Conn., The New York Times reported..“I danced about with my camera shooting the punch-out,” he wrote in an essay. “An officer grabbed me and began beating me.” He was held in jail overnight..In April 1969, while on assignment for Time and Life, Page was aboard a helicopter that landed to rescue wounded US soldiers. He followed a sergeant out of the chopper to pick up the wounded. The sergeant stepped on a land mine and lost both legs..Struck by shrapnel, Page was pronounced dead at a military hospital, then was revived, then died and was revived again, finally recovering enough to be transferred to the US, where he endured months of rehabilitation and therapy before picking up his cameras and heading back to work..While still recovering from his wounds, Page would learn that Flynn and another US photographer, Dana Stone, had been captured in Cambodia. They were never seen again..In a 2016 essay in The Guardian newspaper, he described his “band of brothers” as “a hard core of photographers, writers and a few TV folks that were regulars in the field who understood the fear and the horror, yet who could still groove on its edge.”.When a publisher asked him if he would write a book that took the glamour out of war, Herr writes, Page exclaimed, “Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?”.He went on: “It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones. I mean, you know that it can’t be done.”.In the 1970s, he worked as what he called a “gonzo photographer,” tripping with and covering the drug-fueled world of rock, hippies and Vietnam veterans, mostly for music magazines like Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone..In 1997, Page and Horst Faas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer of the Vietnam War, published “Requiem,” which contained the work of 135 photographers who had died in Indochina between 1945 and 1975..Images by Flynn and Stone appear in the book, along with photographs by Page’s mentors, Larry Burrows and Henri Huet. Both were killed in 1971 when the helicopter they were in was shot down in Laos..In recent years, Page taught at Australia’s Griffith University and often led photography seminars in Southeast Asia..His archives contain at least 750,000 images he has shot through the years, including in Vietnam and during conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans and Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported..In the end, he told the British newspaper the Observer in 2001, war is “about the wastage of the human race. … Sure, you can make it look like a movie — you can make a tableau vivant out of it — but then you turn your camera, no matter how many degrees, and all you see is pure suffering. Who are the victims? Everybody who’s in a war is a victim.”.Page is survived by wife and son, Kit, with an earlier partner, Clare Clifford.. Tim PageTim Page
