After more than 40 years of traveling through and documenting Southeast Asia, renowned US-Vietnam War era photographer Tim Page is back in Cambodia for some unfinished business.
The 64-year-old photographer said in an interview Sunday in Phnom Penh that over the next few weeks he plans to track down new leads in the 1971 deaths of his friends and fellow journalists, Dana Stone and Sean Flynn.
Stone and Flynn were abducted near the Vietnam-Cambodian border in April 1970 and were killed the following year by their Khmer Rouge captors.
Page wants to continue the research he conducted in 1990 into the deaths of his friends, which led to the discovery of their remains in Kompong Cham province. Many questions remain unanswered about their final days and how Stone and Flynn eventually met their end, he said.
“There are still a number of slightly loose ends,” Page said of his years of investigations, adding that his new research is a “retirement” project.
During this visit to Cambodia, Page said he has some freelance work to do for magazines, and he will also hold an exhibition of his photography at Meta House from Jan 3 to 7 that will feature some of his photographs taken in the past 40 years.
“Whatever makes you click and tick, you can find it and do it here in terms of stories, in terms of the people, in terms of the lifestyle,” Page said of his enduring interest in Asia. “You slip into this strange hole. It’s not a black hole. It’s far too colorful to be black,” he said.
Page is most famous for his work when he was part of a maverick group of young journalists and photographers who covered the Vietnam War, and their photographs and stories reflected the raw experiences of unfettered access to US troops, battlefields and patrols.
Born in England, Page was in his early 20s when he began covering the war in 1965. Four years later, in 1969, a piece of shrapnel struck him in the head as he helped an injured US soldier into an evacuation helicopter. The accident put an end to his coverage of the US War in Vietnam.
