NY Times photographer, AAJA member Dith Pran, dies

Dear AAJA photographers,

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country’s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film “The Killing Fields,” died Sunday. He was 65.

Dith died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago.

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.

Schanberg helped Dith’s family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

It was Dith himself who coined the term “killing fields” for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia’s 7 million people.

“That was the phrase he used from the very first day, during our wondrous reunion in the refugee camp,” Schanberg said later.

With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence, even wearing glasses or wristwatches, Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch.

After Dith moved to the U.S., he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Schanberg described Dith’s ordeal and salvation in a 1980 magazine article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” Schanberg’s reporting from Phnom Penh had earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

Later a book, the magazine article became the basis for “The Killing Fields,” the highly successful 1984 British film starring Sam Waterston as the Times correspondent and Haing S. Ngor, another Cambodian escapee from the Khmer Rouge, as Dith Pran.

The film won three Oscars, including the best supporting actor award to Ngor.

“Pran was a true reporter, a fighter for the truth and for his people,” Schanberg said. “When cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made my brother so special.”

Dith spoke of his illness in a March interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., saying he was determined to fight against the odds and urging others to get tested for cancer.

“I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body,” he said. “It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.”

Dith Pran was born Sept. 27, 1942 at Siem Reap, site of the famed 12th century ruins of Angkor Wat. Educated in French and English, he worked as an interpreter for U.S. officials in Phnom Penh. As with many Asians, the family name, Dith, came first, but he was known by his given name, Pran.

After Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, broke off relations with the United States in 1965, Dith worked at other jobs. When Sihanouk was deposed in a 1970 coup and Cambodian troops went to war with the Khmer Rouge, Dith returned to Phnom Penh and worked as an interpreter for Times reporters.

In 1972, he and Schanberg, then newly arrived, were the first journalists to discover the devastation of a U.S. bombing attack on Neak Leung, a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with eastern Cambodia.

Dith recalled in a 2003 article for the Times what it was like to watch U.S. planes attacking enemy targets.

“If you didn’t think about the danger, it looked like a performance,” he said. “It was beautiful, like fireworks. War is beautiful if you don’t get killed. But because you know it’s going to kill, it’s no longer beautiful.”

After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 and seized control of territory, Dith escaped from a commune near Siem Reap and trekked 40 miles, dodging both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge forces, to reach a border refugee camp in Thailand.

From the Thai camp he sent a message to Schanberg, who rushed from the United States for an emotional reunion with the trusted friend he felt he had abandoned four years earlier.

“I had searched for four years for any scrap of information about Pran,” Schanberg said. “I was losing hope. His emergence in October 1979 felt like an actual miracle for me. It restored my life.”

After Dith moved to the U.S., the Times hired him and put him in the photo department as a trainee. The veteran staffers “took him under their wing and taught him how to survive on the streets of New York as a photographer, how to see things,” said Times photographer Marilynn K. Yee.

Yee recalled an incident early in Dith’s new career as a photojournalist when, after working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, he was robbed at gunpoint of all his camera equipment at the back door of his apartment.

“He survived everything in Cambodia and he survived that too,” she said, adding, “He never had to work the night shift again.”

Dith spoke and wrote often about his wartime experience and remained an outspoken critic of the Khmer Rouge regime.

When Pol Pot died in 1998, Dith said he was saddened that the dictator was never held accountable for the genocide.

“The Jewish people’s search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people’s search for justice doesn’t end with Pol Pot,” he said.

Dith’s survivors include his companion, Bette Parslow; his former wife, Meoun Ser Dith; a sister, Samproeuth Dith Nop; sons Titony, Titonath and Titonel; daughter Hemkarey Dith Tan; six grandchildren including a boy named Sydney; and two step-grandchildren.

Dith’s three brothers were killed by the Khmer Rouge.

The AAJA Dith Pran PhotoShootOut Award was established in 2000. The first place winner of this photography competition has his/her name inscribed on the national Dith Pran Trophy, named in honor of Dith.

The next photo contest will take place at the Boston convention August 12-15, 2009.

Dith Pran PhotoShootOut Award winners:

2007 Michelle Le
2006 Tue Nam Ton
2005 Sunghyun Jun
2003 Chihiro Koga
2002 Lance Cheung
2001 Paul Kuroda
2000 Dennis Oda

Before Dith died, he would like to thank everyone for all their kindnesses, cards, letters, prayers, thoughts, gift baskets, emails  and visits.

If you would like to send a condolence card, please mail to:

Dith Pran family
124 Beverly Hill Terrace  Apt. #G
Woodbridge,  NJ  07095

The family requests no flowers. Services pending.

Information from Associated Press, Asian American Journalists Association and Marilynn K. Yee, of the New York Times.

posted by,

Paul Sakuma

psakuma@aol.com

 

Miami Images

Dear photo conventioneers,

I hope you enjoyed Miami as much as I did.

If you have photos you want to share on the AAJAphoto.org web site, please email to: baron@mediabaron.com

If you have photos you think AAJA national office could use for future use, please mail on CD to:
AAJA – Janice Lee
1182 Market Street, Suite 320
San Francisco, CA 94102

If you plan to come to Unity, please send me workshop ideas before Aug. 29. Here are some ideas we have submitted:

1. Multimedia for photographers. This is an all-day session.
2. Sports photography
3. Student critiques: put students on the hot seat as they show their work to top photo editors who are looking for talent.
4. PhotoShootOut. Photographers compete for top prizes such as digital cameras for a live photo contest. Photographers will have from Wednesday thru Friday to come up with images. Think of theme?
5. Freelance photography. Top photojournalism freelancers talk about their work from getting the assignments to shooting through the business aspects.
6. Student Newspaper Project. Photo editors to work on student newspaper project. College students to work on multimedia newspaper. Professional photographers to work as
mentor with college students during the project.
7. Election photography. Stan Honda moderator. Since this is election year. The democratic and republican conventions is in the following months. Top election photographers can talk about their travels. Show their work. Eric Draper and Christoper Morris
8. Overseas & “photo projects in your backyard – community journalism”
9. lighting and remote sessions
10. Ethics ethics in multimedia.
11. Photo outing for Chicago Pizza
12. Photo cruise on Lake Michigan

Paul Sakuma
AAJA photography
psakuma@aol.com

More Multimedia for photogs

Application forms are now available for the upcoming Sports Shooter Academy Boot Camp to be held Nov. 2 – 3, 2007 in Southern California.

The Sports Shooter Academy Boot Camp will be an intensive two full days combining multimedia training and sports photography. If you want to take your work to “the next level” — Internet presentations combining stills, audio and video — this workshop is for you.

Info on the Boot Camp: http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1802

Application Forms:

http://www.sportsshooter.com/pix/ssacad/ssacad-boot-camp-application.zip

Goodbye Miami, Hello Chicago

Dear AAJA photographers, photo editors and photo students,

Another successful and fun national AAJA convention is over. Here are some photography highlights of the convention in Miami. Hopefully we will see you at Unity next year in Chicago.

  • Almost $5,000 was raised in the Silent Photo Auction.
  • National photo award winners were Therese Tran, of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and Kuni Takahashi of the Chicago Tribune won top honors for the annual contest.
  • PhotoShootOut winners were Michelle Le, of SF State and Shaminder Dulai, of SJ State, who won over $1000 in photo prizes and the Dith Pran perpetual trophy.
  • Five photo students were grilled nearly two hours in a lively discussion with top photo editors from around Florida.
  • Photo parties at a Haitian restaurant, Cuban restaurant, Caribbean restaurant as well as a photo cruise around Miami.
  • All-day multimedia workshop with San Jose Mercury News Dai Sugano, New York Times Andrew DeVigal, and Washington Post Ben de la Cruz.
  • Michael Yamashita, of the National Geographic, showed his work on China.
  • Overseas photography with AFP Stan Honda, freelance Laura Pohl, National Geographic Michael Yamashita and Chicago Tribune Kuni Takahashi.
  • Student multimedia Voices project with student photographers Michelle Le, from SF State and Shaminder Dulai, from SJ State. Photo editors were freelancer Laura Pohl and Bernadette Tuazon, of AP.

You can find more info on AAJA photography: https://www.aajaphoto.org

If you have any ideas for Unity, please let us know. If you are planning to attend, please let us know too.
More info on Unity photography: http://www.unityphoto.org

Paul Sakuma
AAJA photography
psakuma@aol.com

Miami – Day Four

Michael Yamashita on cruise

Michael on the Island Queen Cruise ready to explore Biscayne Bay. Not quite his usual exotic adventure.

Cheryl bunny ears

Cheryl works to get the bunny ears on Michael.

Paul on cruise

Our fearless leader Paul on the cruise. No attempts at conch shell blowing this year.

Miami Skyline

The Miami skyline as most vessels were motoring a bit faster than us.

Kuni Photo

Kuni works his overseas photo skills, or at least photos on the sea.

Gloria Estefan home

Okay, our skipper said this home belongs to Gloria Estefan but we didn’t see her for the paparazzi moment.

20070804_phototime.jpg

At the Gala Banquet, as you can see everyone likes to hang with the photographers.

Beauty Table

The beauty table at the silent auction.

Happy Eugene

Why is Eugene smiling? Because he won a prize and what happens where he’s going, stays where he’s going.

Miami – Day Three

Student Critiques

Students were in the hot-seat with live photo critiques during the opening of the Friday photo session. Photographers were able to talk to photo editors during the convention about their images.

Michael Yamashita talks

Michael, right, talks to photographers after giving his presentation on his project for National Geographic of world explorer Zheng He.

Therese review

Therese, center, goes over some of her images in the photo room at the convention.

Kuni on overseas photography

Kuni takes questions regarding photography overseas.

Therese South Beach

Therese takes in the sights of South Beach.

More South Beach

More South Beach explorers who braved the humidity.

Miami – Day Two

Andrew and Dai

Andrew and Dai give their multimedia sessions Thursday at the AAJA convention. Video, slideshows, hybrid packages. Lots of great information.

You can find some of the great information they talked about on

Photographer’s dinner at Versailles

The photographer’s dinner at Versailles Restaurant.

Versailles Mojito

Some mojitos around the table.

Eugene, Marc and Stan

Eugene, Marc and Stan talk photojournalism at Versailles Restaurant.

Miami – Day One

Cheryl and Eugene

Cheryl and Eugene in the photo room during auction photo set-up.

Auction Prints

Prints framed for the photo auciton.

Concert Hall Tour

AAJA members take a tour of the Knight Concert Hall in Miami before the opening reception.

Eugene shoots the hall

Eugene shoots the concert hall

Taiko Drummers

Taiko drummers open the AAJA convention.

Opening Crowd

The opening night crowd at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, Florida.

Corky, Leah, James, Baron

Corky, Leah, James and Baron at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts for the AAJA opening night reception. I think Corky is begging for more appetizers to be sent our way.

Mambo Gang

After dinner at the Mambo Restaurant. Great cuban food and great mojitos at Bayside.