Book & Christine Spengler: A Few Hours Before the Fall of Phnom Penh

Excerpts from an interview with the legendary Christine Spengler conducted in 2009 by Margaux Duquesne. Christine Spengler is a war photographer, one of the few to have brought back photographs from the bombing of Phnom Penh in April 1975.

Since 1970, she has photographed and covered conflicts, mainly from the perspective of war victims. She has worked as a freelance photographer for Sipa-Press, Corbis-Sygma, and the AP.

Christine Spengler has documented numerous conflicts around the world, including in Chad, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Western Sahara, Kurdistan, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Her work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide, including Paris-Match, Time, Newsweek, El País, The New York Times, and Le Monde.

Christine Splengler has won several awards for her work as a journalist, including the SCAM Prize (Paris) for her report on women in war in 1998 and Woman of the Year in Brussels in 2002. She was honored with a retrospective exhibition in 2003 at the International Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan.

Excerpts

“... War correspondents and bullfighters have a lot in common. Both face death. The difference is that for bullfighters, death awaits them at a specific time and place. Whereas for us war correspondents, death awaits us at any minute and on any road...”

“... Here (photo below), all the other male photographers rushed to photograph the father swimming in his blood. I didn't take a single shot. I waited. And when I saw the child running desperately, kneeling near the stretcher where his dead father lay, wrapped in a plastic poncho, with the shadow of the mortar behind him, I took two photos, very discreetly.

I told myself that it was more important to show the pain of the surviving child who, just a few hours earlier, had been swimming with his friends in the Mekong River and who, all of a sudden, had been thrust into the front lines of war...”

”...On the road, I was in a taxi a few hours earlier. Suddenly, I saw children in the middle of the war playing and learning to swim on empty shell casings in the Mekong River. I asked the taxi driver to stop so I could take this photo because I always like to show hope. And a few hours later, I found this child at his father's bedside, whom he wouldn't even have time to bury because the child would have to survive under the bombs..."

Excerpt from the book:

“With her Nikon 28mm on her knees, Christine Spengler rushes toward the only building still lit up: the Hotel Continental, the meeting place for journalists in Saigon. The year is 1973. On the seventeenth floor of the Associated Press building, the agency's big boss, Horst Faas, nicknamed Orson Welles, never sleeps and lives hunched over a table of negatives, magnifying glass in hand.”

“Good evening, I want to go to the front tomorrow,” Christine announces. The crowd straightens up and examines her Japanese doll-like face. Vietnam has already killed fifty-three photographers. ‘Well, baby, very easy,’ replies Orson Welles. ”Be there tomorrow morning at 5:30.”

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