`Indochina came to us in snapshots that lodged in our consciousness like hot shrapnel in a wound," writes Tad Bartimus, a veteran Vietnam war reporter, in a book that celebrates the work of the 135 photographers who died taking the images that changed our view of war for ever.
Requiem is a tribute to the dead of both sides in the Vietnam war by one who survived - although only just. The name of Tim Page will always be associated with the war in Vietnam: he was wounded four times, the last time so badly he was designated dead on arrival at the field hospital where doctors removed a portion of his brain: for a year, he was paralysed down his left side. Although he continues to work as a photo-journalist, Page has never again shot "conflict photography" - although, as his co-editor Horst Fass, a Pulitzer prize-winning Vietnam photo-journalist, told the audience of fellow photo-journalists at the launch of Requiem in London last week, "Tim has never really left Indochina".
It began by chance. Forestry had been Page's intended career and he was working as an aid worker in Laos with the US Agronomy Department when hostilities broke out there. He had just been given $100 and an old Pentax camera in payment for six weeks' stringing for UPI when the puppet regime in Vientiane etat.was deposed. Borders were closed but every evening, while everyone else was "pooled up" in the US embassy, the 20-yearold English drop-out took his motorbike and his camera, rode through rebel lines, canoed across the Mekong into Thailand and delivered his film to the nearest US air base. His story was a UPI exclusive for five days. Now in his late fifties, but with that maverick streak intact, Page recalls the sealing of his fate. "When the coup was over, the bureau chief from Saigon arrived and said `Want a job, kid?' " First stop Vietnam. The images in Requiem begin in the early 1950s with the work of Everette Dixie Reese, who was sent out by the US government to set up darkroom and wire facilities in Saigon to lock the South Vietnamese into the US propaganda machine. Neither Page nor anyone else on the project had ever even heard of him before a parcel of Reese's photographs arrived "out of the blue from his family in Tennessee". Reese's elegiac pictures of a peaceful people in a timeless landscape are in poignant contrast to those that follow. It was that seductive mix of beauty and terror that was to prove so addictive to journalists - both writers and photographers - over the next quarter century. The defeat of the French colonialists by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu resulted in partition in 1954, but the communists in the industrial north couldn't survive without the agriculture of the south. So began the war of reunification we call the Vietnam war, the war the Indochinese call the American war, the war that invented photo-journalism, the war which arguably was ended through the power of the still photograph as the horrendous reality of what was happening to young Americans was brought into every US home in newspapers and magazines.
In the second World War photographers had been under the control of the military - not weapon-carrying, but in uniform and under orders. It was, explains Page, a rigid control system. Vietnam changed all that. Anyone with a camera and a streak of madness who could tough it out could get press accreditation, and hundreds did, from photographers with international reputations, to foolhardy hopefuls.
The bullet and the landmine did not discriminate. Vietnam was where the great second World War photographer Robert Capa died; it was where Larry Burrows, the English former darkroom boy who turned colour photography into an art form with his work for Life magazine, was killed; but most of the names in Requiem are of unknowns.
Most were never even credited individually, their pictures simply ascribed to the major picture agencies, AP, UPI and AFP. It was the death of another well-known name, Sean Flynn - son of Errol Flynn - that was the inspiration for this book. In 1970 Flynn and another young American photographer, Dana Stone - the pair were known as the "easy riders" - set off from Phnom Penn on their red motor cycle, never to return, just two of the 11 photographers who went missing in Cambodia after the March coup.
Flynn and Tim Page were of an age, brothers-in-arms who escaped the horrors of war in the time-honoured Indochina way - drinking, frequenting opium dens and generally hell-raising together. Each promised to break the news to the other's family "should anything go wrong". (And this Page was able to do.) Finding out what had actually happened to his friend became Page's obsession. Yet it was 20 years before he was able to get into Cambodia, with a small documentary crew, and pick up the trail.
Flynn's and Stone's bodies have never been found but Page feels he has succeeded in resolving their fate. "We found remains and enough witnesses to say this is probably what happened."
It turned out that Flynn and Stone had been kept prisoner for more than a year before being executed. "There are certain parts of what happened to Sean and Dana which I don't know. I know which unit captured them and I know the name of the commander of that unit and I know where the veterans of those units meet in a tea shop in Hanoi. But I haven't been there. I don't know about five or six months of their history. Maybe now that will all come clear."
The hope is that the book may prove the oil needed to unlock the final door. Because, for all the money that is pouring into Vietnam, the publication by an western publishing house honouring the country's war dead marks an extraordinary milestone in reconciliation. "It was literally a rainy day in Hanoi and I said `Take me to your archives. I want to look for dead photographers' pictures'. People had gone to their archives before, but just looking for stock images. Nobody had gone in to look for just a very specific part of it. And nobody had any idea how many photographers they had lost." The answer was 72, all VLA soldiers - Viet Cong.
"When you start looking through their pictures, although they fulfil their propaganda roles, mixed in with those are some incredible images. Because you can't repress photography that much." The discovery of this vast body of high-quality work, almost immediately after three boxes of Sean Flynn's prints, long assumed lost, turned up in a New York skip was enough to convince Tim Page that a book was a viable possibility.
The Vietnamese gave Page free rein. Knowing there was no money, their fee for world rights was 60 cents an image. With money made from the book, Page plans a memorial to journalists of both sides, trees on an island in the middle of a lake "in the middle of nowhere", on a 27-hectare site in what was known as the DMZ, the demilitarised zone.
That's the easy bit. His eventual aim is to build a media faculty at Hue University, which will cost real money. "Using the book as a flagship, hopefully we can start hitting various foundations and corporates to get money to put a faculty together." As digital technology continues to erode the traditional markets for serious photojournalism, foreign assignments for individual magazines and newspapers are largely a memory - but Requiem serves as a timely reminder of the power of the still photograph. The belief in that power continues to drive Tim Page and a new generation of photojournalists to risk their lives at the front line to bring us the truth of war.
The response in the US to Requiem has exceeded all expectations. Launched early last month, the first edition of this unique record and tribute has already sold out. This, Page says, is unheard of for a photography book selling at $65. The Japanese edition is already reprinting.
Seeing that most terrible of wars unfold through the eyes of those who died taking the pictures - some frames even captioned "last roll of film" - gives a poignancy to the book beyond the force of the images themselves. "It's like a piece of music," Page says. "There's a tremendous joy at the end of the book and you don't end up depressed. It's an incredible celebration at the end of the day."
Requiem, edited by Tim Page and Horst Faas, is published by Jonathan Cape, price £40 sterling