My main photographic and photojournalistic obsessions lie in parts of Asia that were being ripped apart by war circa 1950-70. Grit, sweat and grime transfer seamlessly into black and white prints, but it takes a special kind of person to be in amongst the reeds with the troops and capture the kind of photographs that have rocked the world. Perhaps I’m just biased, but I feel there is a certain intimacy about photos from this war period that I don’t think has been matched to the same extent.

Through my delving into this bloodstained, humid chunk of history, I’ve come to love the work of people like Catherine LeRoy, Larry Burrows, Horst Faas, Eddie Adams, Henri Huet, Dith Pran, Sean Flynn, Dana Stone and Dickey Chapelle. But there were hundreds of photographers embedded with the forces in the region and it was through searching for some more of these people that I came across Requiem: By The Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina.

I thought I had struck gold – it featured the work of over 100 photographers and was edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page. But stocks on Amazon were drying up fast and, shockingly enough, most copies eclipsed the hundred euro mark. It would be an expensive treat for myself, but a treat nonetheless – and books like this are for life. My mother rang a few bookshops here in Dublin on my behalf and found one that said it could actually order it in and that the overall price would be around half of what I had seen online. Then mum offered to get the book for me as my Christmas present. So all in all, I was a happy (and lucky) bunny. And I’d not been so excited to read a book since The Bang Bang Club a few months beforehand.

Christmas came but the book didn’t. January, February, March, April, May, June. Where are we now – July?

‘Ma, remember you ordered Requiem last year? Any word from the bookshop?’
‘Yes, they said it’s now out of print and actually they won’t be getting it in after all.’

How nice of them to let us know.

Horst Faas - War Is Hell