Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

Barton Silverman, Dith Pran

By Douglas Martin, The New York Times

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians—a third of the population—were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation...

READ ON at nytimes.com

Video here

_____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Jim Metzger: "I had the immense pleasure of meeting Mr. Dith not once but twice.

"I was covering the 'Blessing of the Animals' at St. Johns Cathedral in N.Y.C. for the ASPCA. No real credentials, I was just a volunteer. As the animals exited the church at the end of the service, a hand reached down from the official photographers viewing platform and Dith Pran pulled me up to join the 'professionals.' As far as he was concerned, if you carried a camera, you deserved an opportunity to shoot with everyone else. The whole incident lasted just a few minutes; I was able to express my thanks and admiration at what he had endured and accomplished in his life.

"Several years later I was part of a large demonstration with the ACLU at N.Y. City Hall. Not photographing, just participating. Dith Pran was covering it for the New York Times. Amazingly he remembered me and stopped to talk about my photography career.

"What a humble and inspirational human being. I 'knew' him for just a few moments but he has left a deep and lasting impression on me.

"Pran, you are missed but not forgotten. I will try to do better."

Comments

[David Crouthamel]

Mike, Thanks so much for this link to Mr. Dith's obit in the Times. He deserves wider recognition and let us hope that his efforts will never let us forget the nightmare that was Cambodia's fate in the 1970"s.

[Carl Leonardi]

Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.
And we bicker over megapixels, price of cameras and the price of toilet paper. Watch moronic survival shows(I will not watch them) that are nothing like what real life is all about and what Dith Pran went through for what he believed in.
Thank you Dith for your commitment to life.

[Jon]

It is sad, life, is so very short. What a remarkeable man. Like a survivor of Auschwitz stated to a silly reporter "You, do not know what the will to live is!". He did.

Would it not have been -wonderful- to be with him, just to -be- with him, for a single day!

Jon ...

[JChristian]

Tops my list of "films I can't believe I've never managed to watch". I will do so this weekend. An inspirational story.