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Born in Rhuddlan, Wales, Philip Jones Griffiths studied pharmacy in Liverpool and worked in London while photographing part-time for the Manchester Guardian. In 1961 he became a full-time freelancer for the London-based Observer. He covered the Algerian War in 1962, then moved to Central Africa. From there he moved to Asia, photographing in Vietnam from 1966 to 1971.
His book on the war, Vietnam Inc., crystallized public opinion and gave form to Western misgivings about American involvement in Vietnam. One of the most detailed surveys of any conflict, Vietnam Inc. is also an in-depth document of Vietnamese culture under attack.
Griffiths’ assignments, often self-engineered, took him to more than 120 countries. He continued to work for major publications such as Life and Geo on stories such as Buddhism in Cambodia, droughts in India, poverty in Texas, the re-greening of Vietnam, and the legacy of the Gulf War in Kuwait. His continued revisiting of Vietnam, examining the legacy of the war, lead to his two further books Agent Orange and Vietnam at Peace.
Griffiths’ work reflects on the unequal relationship between technology and humanity, summed up in his book Dark Odyssey. Human foolishness always attracted Griffiths’ eye, but, faithful to the ethics of the Magnum founders, he believed in human dignity and in the capacity for improvement
Philip Jones Griffiths died at home in West London in March 2008.
Read and watch more on Philip Jones Griffiths here:
- Philip Jones Griffiths, a short film
- An interview in Photo Histories
- A slide show and interview in Aperture
- Background materials for the acclaimed show 50 Years on the Frontlines: Philip Jones Griffiths Photographs with links to video and more.
- Images from his book, Vietnam Inc.
Work by Philip Jones Griffiths was part of the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Wendy Watriss is a photographer, curator, journalist, and writer. She is one of the founders of FotoFest, the internationally known photographic arts and education organization based in Houston, Texas. Watriss began her professional career as a reporter and writer for national newspapers in the U.S. and later became a producer of news documentaries for national public television in New York. From 1970 to 1992, she worked internationally as a professional photographer. In her editorial and photo journalistic work, she has covered the 1968 political upheavals in East and Central Europe, the effects of drought in the African Sahel, civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador and the political history of Texas’ cultural frontiers.
As a young girl growing up in Europe in the fifties, Wendy Watriss saw the poverty and suffering that followed World War II. In her work as a photographer and documentary filmmaker, she has gravitated to themes of need and injustice as well as to social and political subjects. She became interested in the Vietnam war and the lives of U.S. Vietnam War veterans affected by the herbicide Agent Orange in 1980 .
Since 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened, I’ve been back many times. I find the people’s response to the memorial and to each other very moving. It shows again that war doesn’t end when the combat is over.
Wendy Watriss from an interview with Lois Tarlow
Read more about the power of photo journalism and Agent Orange in these articles for the Nieman Foundation by Wendy Watriss.
Wendy Watriss photographic work has been published and exhibited around the world, and she is the recipient of numerous international awards for her photography. Her work on Vietnam veterans affected by Agent Orange was part of the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Hien Duc Tran was born in Vietnam and came to the U.S. as a refugee at the age of twelve in 1975. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Boston’s American Studies Program in 1987, where he pursued his joint interests in photograph and ethnic studies. He has been chronicling developments in the local Vietnamese community since 1984. 
In 1989, he returned to Vietnam as a photojournalist, accompanying a delegation of American Vietnam veterans.
In August 1990, his exhibit entitled Ngoc I Was, Pearl I Am: An Exhibition of Photographs on the Amerasian Experience in Boston and Vietnam was held at the Boston Public Library.
Hien Duc Tan about this project:
…But most of all it has been the Amerasians themselves to whom my heart has listened; I am in deep gratitude to them all. Yet, even so, I cannot quite escape the feeling that I have somehow sinned against them, a kind of simony of their suffering…. I have no real defense beyond that ancient justification that spiritual beauty must always be recorded. In the suffering of these children, I have felt a terrible beauty breaking forth for which I must personally make a record…. I feel honored they invested so much with me. And while they more easily permitted my questions and prying lens in Vietnam than they ever could in New England, it is here that I have come to understand and appreciate the bravery of these children who have survived so much, now, finally, surviving even their dreams themselves.
Hien Duc Tran’s work was part of the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Meridel Rubenstein mixes mediums and metaphors to make art about our tenuous connection to place. Originally trained as a photographer, she combines disparate materials such as earthy palladium prints with cold steel mounts, transparent photographic imagery with imagery sandblasted into glass, video imagery projected onto cast glass, and digital still imagery on floating vellum and hand-coated tree bark papers. A sense of fragility, transparency, and passage, in her works, underscores a possibility for change. Her complex narrative photoworks and installations derive from a sense of place, personal and collective history as well as myth — the precarious landscape of the cultural mind.
In more recent work, like Joan’s Arc/Vietnam, she uses Vietnam and the American war as a mirror for different ideas in the east and west about nature/ body /place / forgiveness. Large luminous digital prints on hand coated paper combine with video projections and objects in wood and sandblasted glass. The image in this blog post was part of the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Reknown art writer Rebecca Solnit has written of Meridel Rubenstein:
…a consummate maker of metaphors, an artist who can never talk about only one thing at a time, but speaks of things in relationship, of lives to landscapes, of corporeal location and homing in terms of labyrinths and minotaurs, of bombs in terms of other myths, of physicists in relationship to pueblos.
Aaron Hughes is an artist, activist, and a Veteran of the Iraq War. He served in the Illinois National Guard from 2000 to 2006. He was deployed to Kuwait and Iraq in April 2003 and stayed until July 2004 as an 88M truck driver. On his return to the states he has dedicated his life to making art that will deconstruct the culture of dehumanization and hate that was so prevalent while deployed. He is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. The artwork below was featured in the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Dust Memories is a series of drawings, paintings, and collages attempting to communicate the ambiguous and anxious moments of a deployment with the 1244th Transportation Company in support of combat operations in Iraq.
This book is conceived as a repeating cycle, which is a metaphor for my continually repeating thoughts of the experience, as well as representing the reality that this journey is still being carried out today by soldiers in Iraq.
~ Aaron Hughes
In the interview The Art of Deconstructing War, he talks about how his artwork helps to express his feelings about war. The video below shows Aaron Hughes talking about his exhibit Shifting Memories in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in 2007. In this exhibit Aaron Hughes shares a series of projects that bring to the forefront the very complex personal realities of the War in Iraq:
Read more about Aaron Hughes in these two previous blog posts: Aaron Hughes: Drawing for Peace and Aaron Hughes: Ahmed.
Widely considered the most important Vietnamese poet of his generation, Nguyen Duy began his career as a writer on the battlefields of Vietnam. He has published ten collections of poetry, three collections of memoirs, and a novel. Among his many awards the Vietnam Writers’ Association in 1985. Distant Road, Selected Poems (Curbstone Press, Nov ’99) is the first English translation of his work.
OH STONE
I stand in meditation before Ankor’s ruins,
if stone can be shattered, what of human life?Oh stone,
let me inscribe a plea for peace.In the end, in every war,
whoever won, the people always lost.Kampuchia, 8/1989
Nguyen Duy gave up writing to dedicate himself to the development of the book Tho Thien Ly Tran (Zen Poems from the Tran and Ly dynasties). It was published by the Saigon Cultural Publishing House in 2005. It contains 30 poems selected from thousands written by Zen masters during the Ly (1009-1225) and Tran (1225-1400) eras. His goal is the restoration of poetry, Buddhism and tradition after the war, when many Classic poems were lost. Nguyen Duy reconstructed the Classic poetry in this artist-book from engravings and hangings found in his visits to temples and communal houses. The book has been published on poonah paper, a style of paper used widely in Vietnam which is coated with white powder made from baked shell.
Tho Thien Ly Tran was compiled together with poet Nguyen Ba Chung and has English translations by American poet Kevin Bowen. It was displayed at an exhibition at Suffolk University in Boston, the US, to mark the university’s centenary. It was also exhibited at the Ho Chi Minh City Library and Hanoi’s Van Mieu (Temple of Literature) in 2005. It was presented as a gift at the UN Buddhism conference in 2008. The book was on display during the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Nguyen Duy was born in 1948 in Dong Ve village, Thanh Hoa province, and now lives in Ho Chi Minh City.
During the Vietnam War, the United States used an estimated twelve million gallons of the herbicide Agent Orange to defoliate the landscape and contaminate food sources. Agent Orange contains high levels of dioxin, a carcinogenic and mutagenic chemical that has continued to alter the minds and bodies of generations of Vietnamese people. The work of Keisha Luce focuses on members of the second and third generations of victims.
Using life-molding techniques, I created sculptures during a three- month trip to Vietnam to document visually and physically the long-term consequences of chemical warfare. My activity as a documentary sculptor emerged from my own narrative as the daughter of a disabled Vietnam veteran, who died at the age of thirty-eight of an Agent Orange-related cancer. I see this work as a call to action and believe that art can effectively contribute to the discourse on war and conflict…. This work is dedicated to the millions of victims and their families living with the effects of Agent Orange.
~ Keisha Luce
A number of her sculptures were on display during the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010. Learn more about the work of Keisha Luce on Sum & Parts: Documentary Sculpture and through this interview on New Hampshire Public Radio: Sculpting Agent Orange’s Legacy.
If you want to know more about the ongoing health and environmental impacts of the use of Agent Orange go to Agent Orange Record a website by the War Legacies Project in Vermont.
Artist Heidi Blackwood has been working on project DoD since 2001. The project is called DoD for the date of death list, which is published by the Department of Defense.
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- DoD – March 5, 2007
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- DoD – March 5, 2007 (detail)
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- Dod – March 20, 2007 (detail)
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- DoD – March 20, 2007
In the first two world wars we were called upon as a nation to knit socks, surrender silk for parachutes and pot metals for artillery. These sacrifices were done with a great sense of national pride and a belief that we were liberating the world from tyranny. I wanted to remind our nation and myself of the personal sacrifices we are making as families and citizens on a daily basis for interests we may or may not understand or support.
Women have been asked many times throughout history to do hand work in the name of a cause. As my daily reminder, I have chosen to hand embroider the names of all United States soldiers lost in Operation Enduring Freedom and The Iraq War. These names are chain-stitched onto the front page of the New York Times alphabetically on the day they died. The soldiers that are lost while serving in OEF are embroidered in a light green. The soldiers lost during The Iraq War are embroidered in dark green.
DoD is an on going project that will stretch from Sunday October 7, 2001 through the undetermined time of our involvement in the Iraq War and Operation Enduring Freedom. DoD is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts organization. The work shown in this blog post was on display during the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Veteran artist Aaron Hughes had 3 videos on display during The Odysseus Project art exhibit. You can read more about Aaron Hughes and watch Drawing for Peace in this earlier blogpost. The videos Ahmed and Mohammed grew out of relationships that Aaron Hughes developed with Iraqi children brought to New York for medical and prosthetic services through the Global Medical Relief Fund.
Ahmed Jabar Shareef is my friend and my guardian angel.
The children lining the roads of Iraq begging for food filled me with guilt, cynicism and anger.
Yet Ahmed who has been raped by this war (raped of his youth, raped of his body, raped of his sight, raped of his home, raped of his freedom) has no cynicism in his thoughts.
He gives love and trust without fear.
He grabs my hand and yells, “Run. Run please? Please, run.”
He is a nine-year-old boy who wants to run.
He is a nine-year-old boy who can’t run without someone to lead him. To stop him before the curb, before the tree, before the car that he cannot see.
He is a nine-year-old boy who wants to stomp his feet and twist to pop music.
He is a nine-year-old boy that teaches himself to play piano.
He is a nine-year-old boy that is a bird who knows no barbed wire.
He is a nine-year-old boy that is my guardian angel constantly reminding me that life is for love and trust, not cynicism and anger.
Ahmed Jabar Shareef is my friend.
