The Mindful Moment by Tim Page (Thames & Hudson)
British photographer Tim Page was still in his teens when he arrived in Southeast Asia and was only twenty when United Press International sent him to Saigon as a war photographer in 1965. He remained in Vietnam for four years, leaving only after shrapnel from an exploded land mine “had taken away the right side of my skull.” as Page casually puts it. “On the chopper to the field hospital at Long Bin, my heart had been jump-started three times.”
Page didn’t go back to Vietnam until 1980, when the Observer hired him to accompany the first British tour group to make a post-war excursion, landing in Hanoi and moving through the south. He returned throughout the ‘80s, traveling through Vietnam and into Cambodia, taking photos for two books, Nam and Ten Years After. With photographer Horst Faas, he created Requiem: By the Photographers who Died in Vietnam and Indochina, which is both a book and a photography exhibit that now hangs in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, and includes the work of North Vietnamese combat photographers.
The Mindful Moment is a collage of words and photographs that tumble into sight the way memories emerge in the mind, without regard for chronology or theme. Moving through this gives the feeling of sitting in a room with Page as he pulls out random photographs and tells stories. The disjointed quality of the book adds to its power; past and present exist side by side with no artificial divisions.
At the outset Page honors the “two-thousand year struggle to maintain a homogeneous national identity” that culminated in the Vietnam War, then mourns the changes brought to that country by consumerism, “which has done more to despoil the country’s social harmony than the decade-long war.” If The Mindful Moment has a theme, this would be it. Teenagers wearing jeans on shining new motorcycles and smiling market vendors in 1990’s Hanoi clash against the calm faces of captured Viet Cong suspects in 1969 and the stark portrait of a woman’s face of quiet rage, watching with her children as a hovercraft destroys their home in 1966. Children in Saigon, poor but whole, all of their limbs intact, contrast savagely with babies who were born with cruel defects, physical and mental, caused by Agent Orange.
Page captures the spirituality that runs through Vietnamese life with photographs of funerals, during wartime and in peace. He pays homage to the leader of the “Coconut Daoists,” who led his followers in prayers for peace “around the clock and thoroughout the year,” on Peace Island, while five hundred meters away gunships and bombers did their fatal work. When Page returned to this place after the war, it had become a tourist attraction, “stripped of any dignity.”
“The war,” Page says, “is hard to remember...it was fun, it was a thrill, it was simply terrifying.” Included in the 136 photographs of The Mindful Moment is one taken by another photographer in 1965 during the battle of Chu Phong Mountain. A young man stares from the frame, his face inscrutable, his eyes focused beyond the photographer upon something invisible. It’s Tim Page at twenty during his first year in Vietnam, interrupted for a minute or two while doing his work. As The Mindful Moment shows, he’s never stopped working. ~Janet Brown