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Dark Odyssey

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Phillip Jones Griffiths is one of the greatest living photographers today. This is no small achievement, and can only be clearly understood examining his photographs.
Griffiths is probably best known for his book "Vietnam, Inc." (many of those photographs are included in this edition) but many of his greatest are contained in this superb volume, including some images of the weary, haunted faces of the children of Wales, his birthplace.
Being Welsh, and on the recieving end of British expansionism, Griffiths clearly sympathises (and rightly so) with the Vietnamise civilians (on the recieving end of French AND American expansionism)whose pleading expressions demonstrate clearly how much Americans were "helping" them evade the "evil grip of communism".
If I were to own ONE book of photographs, I would without hesitation choose this volume, for it's images are not only an important documentation of one of the darkest pieces of American history, but an amazing and invaluable work of art.

Welshman Jones Griffiths is one of the world's foremost photojounralists, and it's hard to believe that this is first book in since his highly influential 1971 work "Vietnam, Inc." This collection opens with a six striking early portraits from Wales and England in the 1950s-60s. The most memorable is of a litlte boy about to smash a large rock on top of a pian aso left in a scrap heap. These represent his budding career taking shots in his spare time, and are remarkable for the amount of expression he is able to capture, whether it's on the faces of weary coal miners, wary schoolchildren, or waiting mourners.

Following a laudatory introduction by New Yorker writer Murray Sayle, the bulk of the book is comprised of Jones Griffiths' international work, undertaken as a member (and president) of the presitgious Magnum photographers cooperative. His photography is informed by a strong sense of compassion and empathy for the victims of opression and war. The compositions are strong and many of the images are loaded with stark symbolism. From the very front of the book we get shots of a fat white missionary in knee high socks standing amidst natives in New Guinea, scantily clad European tourists lounging with drinks by a river in Gambia, a white Rhodesian golfer considering her shot with three black caddies and the African savannah in the background.

His series of ten photos from Northern Ireland in the early '70s is loaded with surreal and striking images: a soldier crouches behind a wall in a garden while a woman mows the lawn right behind him; another soldier is prone behind sandbags on a street while women push strollers past him; one of the best portraits in the book is of a grim-faced paratrooper reloads a CS gun. A middle section is scattered with a hodgepodge of images from around the world from the 60s to the early 90s. The book ends with forty images from Vietnam and Camodia, most of which are from his three years there during the war and also appear in Vietnam, Inc.

Defintely a must have for anyone interested in photojournalism.