Vietnam Inc.

Phillip Jones Griffiths, the Welsh photographer/author of Vietnam Inc.–an amazingly one-sided harangue on the Americans and Vietnamese unfortunate enough to have come under his lens–has died. He was 72. I have an old review copy of the 1971 book, which I acquired somewhere. It’s the sort of thing Noam Chomsky would love. Did love, in fact, because as the BBC says, it "became crucial in challenging attitudes to the war" No kidding. It’s also a good lesson in how photos can be made to seem more (or less) than they really are–for instance by the act of moving a headless doll into the foreground for enhanced pathos. The camera does lie. Even without photoshopping. Jones Griffiths proved it.