Hugh Patrick Brown: An Unflinching Life Behind the Camera
An hour with the retired photojournalist Hugh Patrick Brown is an hour entertainingly spent. While his career as a photojournalist for Time Life took him to some far-flung and unusual locations, Northern Ireland, China, and Cambodia among them, during a conversation at his East Hampton residence he recalled his first assignment for People magazine.
“They had shut down Life and started People, and within about six weeks they sent me to Ohio to photograph a chicken flying contest. Every year they mount these mailboxes open at both ends on a grassy hill, put the chickens in, and push them out with plungers. The stuff you remember. . . .”
Though only in his 20s when People launched, he had been a working photojournalist for five years. He majored in journalism at Wagner College and worked for the school newspaper. After graduation he attended the Army Officer Candidate School, and in April 1968 he went to Vietnam as an officer with the 1st Infantry Division.
After seven months as a platoon leader in the field, he became a company commander at Lai Khe, a base 35 miles north of Saigon. With a few months to go before his discharge, he went to work for The Hurricane, an Army magazine. “I was put in charge of a couple of guys who did radio interviews but they didn’t need supervision, so I was able to do whatever I wanted to do.”
Though he went to Cambodia for a few days after the United States invaded that country, he spent most of his last few months in the military in Saigon, where he met many civilian journalists. He separated from the service there and went to work as a stringer for Time magazine.
After returning to the U.S., he was hired by Time Life, where he remained until the early 1990s. He worked as part of the press corps at the Nixon White House, “but I didn’t really like that, it was group journalism, everybody running at the same time, snap, snap, snap.”
Restless, he took off for Northern Ireland in 1972, spending the better part of three years there. “Freelance is kind of hand-to-mouth, but I was single, and it was fun.” While there he met W.H. Van Voris, who had earned his Ph.D. at Trinity College in Dublin and was writing a book. “Violence in Ulster: An Oral Documentary,” for which Mr. Brown took the photographs, was published in 1975. Asked if it was dangerous there, he said, “You had to be a little careful, but I spent seven months leading a platoon in the bushes in Viet nam, and that’s dangerous.”
In 1981, Mr. Brown was sent by Fortune magazine to Guangzhou, China, to photograph a factory. One striking image from that assignment was shown at the Amagansett Library in September as part of an exhibition that covered 40 years of his work. Lit by daylight through a grimy window, that photograph of six workers kneading dough at a large wooden table has the look of a Vermeer painting.
In 1975 he photographed E.O. Wilson, an American biologist known for his work with ants and for his book “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” for which some called him Darwin’s heir while others said his thesis echoed Nazi doctrines on eugenics.
Suspecting the impending controversy, Mr. Brown photographed the young scientist working with ants in his lab. Published in People, it turned out to be the only such photograph. “It’s my money maker. Everyone wants my picture of him, so every couple of months I get another check for 11 dollars and change.”
Other assignments for People led to his spending a week with the basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar when he moved from the Milwaukee Bucks to the Los Angeles Lakers. He also photographed Muhammed Ali when he was training for his fight with Larry Holmes at Deer Lake, Pa. Other notable portraits have included Seamus Heaney, Frank Langella with Edward Gorey, and Candace Bergen.
Images of conflict range from snipers in Derry to the Duran-Leonard fight. Among his more pastoral subjects are a river scene in Hue, Vietnam, shallow-draft boats in China tied up to a huge ship, seagulls at Main Beach in East Hampton, and several photographs of Thai children.
Mr. Brown has reunited annually with members of his Vietnam platoon for the past 23 years. Asked what could bond them more than the experiences they shared, he said, “After a few years, you know what happens? We tell all our war stories, we get tired, and we go to bed. Our wives are more social, they wind up organizing it.”
He returned to Vietnam in 2008 with his wife, Penny, and two members of his platoon and their wives, and found the country much changed. “The average age is 22 to 24, so most people don’t remember the war.” A highway he had traveled during the war that had been flanked by rice patties and water buffalo is now suburbia, and the area around Lai Khe was unrecognizable.
“We were driving up Highway 13, and at one point we stopped and one of my friends got out of the car and started talking to this Vietnamese man. ‘Were you V.C.?’ he asked, and the man said, Yes.’ They had a long conversation about it.”
Robert Rheault, who appears in Ken Burns’s film “The Vietnam War,” was a friend of Mr. Brown. The head of special forces in Vietnam, Colonel Rheault left the military in 1969 after a controversial incident involving the execution of a suspected Vietnamese spy and became director of an Outward Bound program in Maine that helped Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mr. Brown worked with Colonel Rheault at Outward Bound, taking photographs that were used in fund-raising.
He said of a picture taken in the Tian Shan mountains of Uzbekistan with a group of Afghan veterans, “It was an interesting bunch of guys. We spent a week or two with them in Moscow and then Uzbekistan and then brought them back to the U.S. I did a piece on that trip for The Boston Globe.”
Ms. Brown’s mother bought the house they now live in 1946 and built a second one toward the rear of the property. “She deeded us this house and Dan, Penny’s brother, the house in back. Penny and I were both working in the city, so we rented it out during the summers and came out during the winters.” He decided to retire four years ago, and they have lived in East Hampton full time since then.
He belongs to the East Hampton Classic Boat Society, whose advertising and website he oversees. He doesn’t own a boat, and he admits to limited woodworking skills. “I scrape and I paint and I sand. And I crew.”
One photograph pinned to his study wall shows Mr. Brown in the Life office with Carl Mydans. Mr. Mydans photographed General MacArthur going ashore at Luzon in the Philippines; David Douglas Duncan, a combat photographer who became a close friend of Pablo Picasso; Alfred Eisenstaedt, another eminent photojournalist, who took the Life magazine cover of a sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day in Times Square, and Fritz Goro, a noted photojournalist and science photographer. Mr. Brown wasn’t exaggerating when he called Life “the one publication where the photographers were the big guys, not the writers.”