Tim Page’s search for a ghost

Tim Page has spent a quarter-century searching for a lost friend, said Seth Mydans in The New York Times. The renowned war photographer has been on a quest to discover the fate of Sean Flynn, a fellow photographer whom he befriended in the mid-1960s while covering the Vietnam War. Flynn, the dashing and glamorous son of actor Errol Flynn, disappeared mysteriously in 1970 while on assignment to photograph Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia. “We could have been brothers, and felt as though we were,” says Page of his bond with Flynn. “I don’t like the idea of his spirit out there tormented. There’s something spooky about being MIA.”

For 25 years, Page, now 66, has been in and out of Cambodia, cutting through jungles and chasing leads from bounty hunters and villagers who might have some memory of Flynn. He now believes that Flynn may have been killed while in captivity, but he’s yet to find proof. Sometimes, while in the jungle, Page says he hears Flynn’s voice. “We have conversations in strange moments. Enough to remind me of the presence of his spirit.” Page says he can’t leave behind his own psychic wounds from Vietnam until he discovers Flynn’s fate: “I suppose the closure of Sean’s fate also has to do with the closure of the whole war experience.”

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