Photojournalist showed the face of modern warfare to the world

Philip Jones Griffiths, a photojournalist whose images from the Vietnam War helped crystallize opposition to the conflict, has died. He was 72.

Jones Griffiths, a longtime member and former president of the prestigious Magnum photo agency, died of cancer at his London home, according to Rhiannon Davies, the agency’s commercial director.

Published in 1971, his book “Vietnam Inc.” was considered one of the most detailed photographic studies of an armed conflict ever published. The first printing of nearly 40,000 sold out immediately and the book became a rare and valued commodity among photography fans and photojournalists.

Time magazine called it “the best work of photo-reportage ever published,” and the master French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called it “the best description of war since Goya,” a reference to Francisco de Goya’s etchings of French soldiers shooting and bayoneting Spanish partisans after Napoleon’s invasion in 1808.

Writing in the reference work “Contemporary Photographers,” Jack Schofield noted that Jones Griffiths “put the war in the context of how it must look to an ordinary Vietnamese peasant in the light of the country’s history and culture.”

In one of the book’s most haunting images, Jones Griffiths shows a wounded Vietnamese woman with her head heavily bandaged. His caption to the 1967 photograph notes that the woman was tagged with the designation “VNC,” a designation for a Vietnamese civilian, rather than “VCS,” or Viet Cong suspect, which was the standard practice.

In another image, U.S. soldiers show compassion to a badly wounded member of the Viet Cong by offering water. The wounded man’s intestines are held in place with a bowl.

Jones Griffiths was born in Rhuddlan, Wales, and, according to Welsh custom, took the last names of both his parents, Joseph Griffiths and Catherine Jones. He started taking pictures at 16 and earned some money photographing weddings while in secondary school. After studying in Liverpool to became a pharmacist, he found work at a Boots Chemist shop in London’s Piccadilly Circus. But he grew bored with “counting pills” on the overnight shift and started taking pictures of the area’s inhabitants -- the drug addicts, prostitutes and drunks.

Those images helped him find freelance work, first with Britain’s Manchester Guardian newspaper and later the Observer.

He shot his first war photos in Algeria in 1962 before moving to Central Africa. He ended up in Vietnam in 1966, the same year he began his association with Magnum, and had extraordinary access to the conflict.

After the Vietnam War, Jones Griffiths went on to photograph the Arab-Israeli War in 1973 but spent much of the rest of his career working in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia. He returned to Vietnam numerous times in the 1980s and 1990s to document the country’s recovery. Those images were collected in the books “Agent Orange Collateral Damage in Vietnam” (2003) and “Vietnam at Peace” (2005).

But his masterwork was “Vietnam Inc.”

“If anybody in Washington had read that book, we wouldn’t have had these wars in Iraq or Afghanistan,” linguist and author Noam Chomsky said of “Vietnam Inc.” when the book was re-released in 2001.

Jones Griffiths, who never married, is survived by two daughters.

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