Tim Page (photographer)

Timothy John Page (25 May 1944 – 24 August 2022) was a British photographer.

He was noted for the photos he took of the Vietnam War, and was later based in Brisbane, Australia.

Page was born John Spencer Russell in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on 25 May 1944.

He did not know his birth mother; his biological father was killed in a torpedo attack in the Arctic while serving in the Royal Navy during World War II and Page was put up for adoption after he was born.

His adoptive father worked as an accountant; his adoptive mother was a housewife.

He is celebrated for his work as a freelance accredited press photographer in Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1960s, also finding time to cover the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967.

Due to a near-death experience in the early 1960s, he came to view his life as "free time".

This led him to take photographs in dangerous situations where other journalists would not venture.

Similarly, Page was captivated by the excitement and glamour of warfare, which helped contribute to the style of photographs he is acclaimed for.

Page was raised in Orpington, and left England in 1962 to make his way overland driving through Europe, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand and Laos.

Without money in Laos, he found work as an agricultural advisor for USAID.

Page began work as a press photographer in Laos stringing for UPI and AFP, having taught himself photography.

His exclusive photographs of an attempted coup d'état in Laos in 1965 for UPI got him a staff position in the Saigon bureau of the news agency.

By late 1965 Page was sharing a house at 47 Bui Thi Xuan, Saigon, with Leonardo Caparros and fellow correspondents Simon Dring, Martin Stuart-Fox and Steve Northup, known as "Frankie's House" after the resident Vietnamese houseboy.

Frankie's House became a social club for a group of correspondents between field assignments and their friends who smoked marijuana there.

Page did not shy away from the drug culture he was involved in during his time in Vietnam, devoting a large amount of his book Page after Page to it.

In Dispatches, Michael Herr wrote of Page as the most "extravagant" of the "wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam", due in most respects to the amount of drugs that he enjoyed taking.

His unusual personality was part of the inspiration for the character of the journalist played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.

In 1965, shortly after Page got his first publication in Life magazine, Beryl Fox was filming The Mills of the Gods: Vietnam for the CBC series Document.

During three weeks of filming, Page was hired to shoot some of the documentary.

At a time when the anti-war movement was in its infancy, the film helped to open conversations around the world.

The first, in September 1965, was in Chu Lai where he was struck by shrapnel in the legs and stomach; the second was in Da Nang during the 1966 Buddhist riots, where he received more shrapnel wounds to the head, back, and arms; the third in August 1966 happened in the South China sea, where he was on board the Coast Guard cutter USCGC Point Welcome, when it was mistaken for a Viet Cong ship, and U.S. Air Force pilots strafed the vessel, leaving Page adrift at sea with over two hundred wounds.

In 1966, the film won the George Polk Award for Best Television Documentary and the Canadian Film Award for Film of the Year.

Page was injured in action four times.

On 9 December 1967, Page was arrested in New Haven, Connecticut, along with fellow journalists Mike Zwerin and Yvonne Chabrier at the infamous Doors concert where Jim Morrison was arrested onstage.

Charges against all four were dropped due to lack of evidence.

Page had a part in the Papers on a war, which became the Pentagon Papers, released by Daniel Ellsberg who had stayed at Frankie's House.

Ellsberg gave Page a copy inscribed "To Tim who may well have changed the course of the war".

Lastly, in April 1969, Page jumped out of a helicopter to help load wounded soldiers.

At the same time, a sergeant stepped on a mine close by, sending a 2-inch piece of shrapnel into Page's head.

This list of injuries led his colleagues in the field to joke that he would never make it to 23 years of age.

He spent the next year in the United States undergoing extensive neuro-surgery.

During recovery he became closely involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and worked as a caregiver for amputees, traumatically shocked and stressed young men.

One of these was Ron Kovic.

Richard Boyle was also friends with Kovic and Page at this time.

In the 1970s Page worked as a freelance photographer for music magazines such as Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone.

During Page's recovery in the spring of 1970 he learnt of the capture of his best friend, roommate and fellow photo-journalist Sean Flynn in Cambodia.

In January 1973 Page spent time with Bill Cardoso and Hunter S. Thompson, who was covering Super Bowl VII.

Page photographed Thompson riding a Black Shadow Motorbike, but Rolling Stone lost the negatives.

Rolling Stone wanted Page to go back to Vietnam with Thompson in 1975 but Thompson said Page was too crazy.