New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran, who endured the killing fields of Cambodia and had a movie made about him in 1984 died on Sunday from pancreatic cancer in Woodbridge N.J.
Pran was partnered up with Sudney Schanberg, a New Yorks Time correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia in the 1970s to help translate for him, take nots and photos as well. However, when communists took over Cambodia in 1975, Schanberg was forced to leave the country and Pran became a prisoner.
His story was recreated in the movie “The Killing Fields” directed by Roland Joffe.
A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.
But despite his frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.
Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.
For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border on Oct. 3, 1979. An overjoyed Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.
“To all of us who have worked as foreign reporters in frightening places,” Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said on Sunday, “Pran reminds us of a special category of journalistic heroism — the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer, who knows the ropes, who makes your work possible, who often becomes your friend, who may save your life, who shares little of the glory, and who risks so much more than you do.”
Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for The Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events. In one, he turned the camera on mourners rather than the coffin to snatch an evocative moment at the funeral of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, who was murdered in 1990.
The New York Times has a full story on his passing.
They also have a photo slideshow of his life.
