BIOGRAPHY
The Greco-Persian Wars had Herodotus; Southeast Asia had Al Rockoff.
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Rockoff, who tragically may be best known for his inaccurate portrayal by John Malkovich in the 1984 Oscar winning film, "The Killing Fields," is one of the greatest documentarian photographers of his generation, in the pantheon alongside contemporaries like Tim Page, Nick Ut, Eddie Adams and Larry Burrows.
The mercurial and cutting savant was known for taking near suicidal risks to capture his stirring images that bore raw the horrors of war. He could be seen in his signature t-shirt and combat boots, coupled with a bushy moustache, mutton chop sideburns and a ponytail, camera always in hand, running towards the sound of gunfire. He was blown up and shot numerous times in the process, and many of his images were too graphic for consumption.
That is the world that Al Rockoff occupies, for better or worse, a nightmarish hellscape where things are too fucked up to be real, a place where a hand is all that's left to be carted away on a stretcher, or bits of flesh splay across a Phnom Penh street like paint on an art student's canvas.
The things he has seen and captured: the truth about the U.S. presence in Vietnam, Kissinger and Nixon’s secret bombing campaign, atrocities committed by the Lon Nol puppet regime and the Khmer Rouge, human cannibalism, indiscriminate bombing, horror.
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Rockoff was born in Rhode Island to parents of Russian and Irish descent but moved to Florida when he was just a year-old. He dropped out of school in the 9th grade and joined the U.S. Navy at 16. By the time he was discovered for having lied about his age and was kicked out, so he joined the Army, intending to make a career out of military service.
Rockoff learned how to use a camera and joined the Signal Corps as an official photographer, as he recalled in a 1986 interview with Florida’s "Sunshine" magazine, “ to get closer to the war.”
He arrived in Vietnam in 1967 and stayed until he was wounded four years later. He spent the better part of 1972 recovering in an Army hospital in Denver.
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When his service was up in 1973, Rockoff bounced back and forth between Vietnam and Cambodia, covering the unfolding chaos as both countries descended into madness. He was known for hitching any ride he could find as long as it was going into combat, driven by a love for photography, the region, its people and adrenaline.
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His photos appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, and with news services like the AP and UPI.
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Rockoff died and was brought back to life on Oct. 2, 1974 when a piece of shrapnel pierced his heart in Kampong Chhnang. He was saved by a Swedish surgeon who was luckily in a nearby aid station and an Air America pilot who flew in and evacuated him back to Saigon. Five weeks later, Al was back in Cambodia, having busted out of another hospital in the Philippines.
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"The truth is worth a man's life," he once said referring to the risks he took to obtain his images.
He was one of only a few journalists that stayed behind in Phnom Penh when it fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975. He documented the group's ascension and barely made it out alive. He claims he was blacklisted for the years that followed, thanks to Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times, who was angry that Al wouldn't hand over his photos to the Times since he was working for Newsweek.
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To add insult to injury, the film, "The Killing Fields," made it look like Cambodian reporter Dith Pran would be exposed due to shoddy film processing work by Rockoff in constructing a fake passport. In reality, Rockoff managed the feat successfully, Pran eventually felt pressure to leave the French embassy on his own. Rockoff has always felt slandered by the filmmakers.
He was called to testify before Cambodia's war crimes tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, in 2013.
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Despite his near legendary status in Indochina, Rockoff is probably not as well known as he should be in the United States. He eschewed fame and fortune over the years and his photos have largely remained unreleased.
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"I have never cashed in on other people's blood and misfortune," he told the magazine. "I never made a buck off it. Frankly, I felt like a whore taking the money I did, covering the war for Time and Newsweek and the Times. What I do care about is the usage of my work, of the truth that it represents. I don't care about recognition for me."
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Some of his most poignant works include U.S. soldiers interrogating Viet Cong captives at knife-point, bodies in the streets of Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge bore down in 1975, child soldiers carrying heavy weapons and wives mourning their deceased government soldier husbands.
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Some of his more tame images today adorn the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Vietnam.
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Rockoff's photos represent a dark chapter of American, and world, history; they are the sad story of the proud people of Angkor, a tale of death, destruction, despair, genocide and rebirth.
