Nam Contact

Renowned for his color images of the Vietnam War, Tim Page has now delved deep into his black-and-white archives of the conflict for the first time. Nam Contact harks back to an era when 36 frames on a roll of film had to tell the story of a particular action. Edited with Stephen Dupont, this book is Page's intricate look at his contact sheets, single images from those sheets, as well as the chronicle and notes of his diaries made about all he experienced during this intense period. It also contains letters from some of the most noted journalists of the time and further ephemera from what became known as the first media war and the first and last war without censorship. Page covered diverse actions with the South Vietnamese, Americans, Koreans and Australians. Nam Contact explores the period from 1965, before the marines had arrived, to 1969, when American troops numbered over 500,000. This was also the year Page's involvement in the Vietnam War ended, after being injured by a landmine. His images have since become iconic; as has the lifestyle he shared with his band of brothers, depicted in the television documentary Frankie's House (1992) as well as numerous movies about the conflict.

Auteur
Born in 1944, Tim Page left England at 17 to travel throughout Europe, the Middle East, India and Nepal. He worked as a correspondent for United Press International in Laos during the civil war, before covering the Vietnam War for five years, largely on assignment for Time Life, Paris Match and the Associated Press. In 1967 Page documented the Six-Day War in the Middle East, before working in the Balkans, Sri Lanka, the Solomon Islands and East Timor; in 2009 he was made a photographic peace ambassador to the United Nations in Afghanistan. Page co-edited the acclaimed Requiem with Horst Faas in 1997, and is the author of a further ten books including The Mindful Moment, published by Steidl in 2002.