The cancer death, Wednesday, March 19, 2008 of anti-war free-lance photographer Phillip Jones Griffith gives those of us who learned to understand war through his lens and those who loved his brilliant photographs an opportunity to review his legacy. A somewhat mis-edited NYT obit is here which includes a link to a few photos. He sold his work through Magnum, a photographers’ cooperative of which became president and it is at the Magnum site that a massive display of his work is available.

His photos were, in my view, eloquent. However, as a dedicated leftish, anti-capitalist, pacifist, he (perhaps losing confidence in his images) added somewhat slogany captions as in this Aperture interview-slideshow . His 1971 photo collection Vietnam, Inc. (recently reissued with intro by Noam Chomsky) shaped how many of us understood that war and inspired many of the images in Apocalypse Now. Memories and appreciations of Phillip Jones Griffiths’ work have been collected here