This is the final volume in Philip Jones Griffiths' epoch trilogy on Vietnam spanning 40 years. His classic "Vietnam, Inc" (1971) and "Agent Orange" (2003) focus on war and its consequences. Here, we are given penetrating glimpses of a society coping with war trauma and getting on with life that demonstrate the care and skill of a renowned photographer who has sustained a sharp and luminous focus on a single society.
His work is an object lesson to the packs of photo-journalists who flit from one disaster to the next, hit-and-run specialists who market images short on empathy with and understanding of the moments in time they capture.
John Pilger, who also first arrived in Vietnam in 1966, writes of the "Goya-like faces and the subversive quality of each image." Griffiths, he remarks, portrays "Viet Nam as a country, not a war."