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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Toxic revelation, 28 Feb 2004
Philip Jones Griffiths has lived his entire life with an awareness of disease. Born and brought up in Rhuddlan, Wales, where his mother was the district nurse, he explained in an interview for the Royal Photographic Society Journal that one of the barometers determining middle class status in his village was an absence of Tuberculosis. Prior to picking up the camera professionally he trained and worked as a pharmacist, giving it up in 1961 when he was offered a contract to photograph for The Observer. He arrived in Vietnam in the summer of 1966: determined to cover the story in much greater depth than had been possible on his previous assignments. Agent Orange, published 37 years after he first set foot in Vietnam, is a testament of his fidelity to that original sentiment. Vietnam Inc, his original response to the conflict, republished last year by Phaidon and long considered the finest piece of reporting to have come out of Vietnam, is credited with beginning the change of public opinion in the USA that eventually brought the war to an end. Agent Orange was one of a number of herbicides tested by US forces in Vietnam: its purpose being to deny food and shelter to the Viet Cong by de-foliating vast areas of the country’s landscape. The Vietnam PR machine made much at the time of the product’s alleged safety. But an accidental by-product constituent of the herbicide was the highly toxic chemical Dioxin which has caused disease in adults, and deformity in the children both of those on the ground beneath the herbicide mist, and those who administered it from above. Jones-Griffiths, who has continued to visit Vietnam on numerous occasions since the American withdrawal, points out that millions were effected by the toxic chemicals. More darkly he evidences that the manufacturers of the chemicals were aware, at the time of its manufacture, of the toxicity of their products: it was however to be dropped on “the enemy” and therefore considered of little consequence. The fall-out contamination amongst US veterans had not been predicted and in the United States has lead to a compensation programme for those who have since developed a number of diseases. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese, have in the main been left to their own devices. Jones-Griffiths however, past President of Magnum and long time campaigner for the people of South East Asia, remains determined that the truth will be seen to out. Evidencing, as it does in unsparing detail, the aftermath of spraying a populated, agricultural landscape with dioxin contaminated compounds, this is a far from easy book to look at. But at a time when the issue of weapons of mass destruction so regularly graces the front pages of the Western media it is perhaps even more crucial that it be examined.
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