Color Complicates Things

World famous Magnum Photographer Phillip Jones Griffiths use to visit my office in Bangkok regularly.  He was this larger than life Welsh man who had what I considered the driest sense of humor I had ever known.  He caught me often with that fish hook in my mouth look and then he would give a faint little smile and say something that let me know he was not serious.

He arrived at my office in that late '90s wearing a Cambodia neck scarf and what we often referred to as a "Boonie" a floppy hat that soldiers in the jungle wore.

The digital photography revolution had arrived in Bangkok, my photos of Pol Pot dead in the jungle, taken with an AP 2000 news camera, had changed things.  The quality back then was horrible.  The file size was 1.7 megs and required quite a bit of working in an editing program before transmitting.  Looking back on it now I can see why Phillip was skeptical.  Phillip carried 40 rolls of Tri X black and white film and a smidgen of color slide film in his bags every time he arrived in Bangkok. 

I never paid much attention to the cameras Phillip was carrying, so many people showed up in the Associated Press' office wanting something back when I was running things.  Phillip was not one of them, other than to say hello and company for lunch.  He did, however, inquire at great length about the digital revolution.  At the time he was shuttling back and forth to Vietnam working on one of his books, "Vietnam Inc." 

We would spend hours talking about black and white photography, my first love.  Just listening to his stories made me think. I began my career with the Associated Press, and it was only black and white.  A few short years later we had moved to all color, it was awful.  I don't think I saw a sharp image for years.

At the time the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was on the run from Royalist forces.  Key leaders had either been captured or killed, and the average soldier and their families were fleeing to Thailand.

We had traveled together to the border area near Surin, Thailand.  Just about everywhere you looked Khmer Rouge soldiers in their baggy green Chinese made uniforms were on the move.  Refugee camps were filling fast.  

At one point I shot this Izusu truck loaded to the roof with refugees.  When I started to file the image, Phillip, looking over my shoulder spoke to me as I worked.  "For fuck's sake David it's not an Isuzu add."  I had made the image vertical showing the full truck on the road.  It was clear suddenly that none of that truck was important, what was the photo was the mass of people on top of it fleeing the fighting.  "Oh, and get rid of that color," he said, "It complicates things."  

​The next day it ran on the front page of the New York Times in black and white.