NEW YORK, NY.- Mark Jury, a photographer whose searing, intimate images from the battlefields of South Vietnam and the deathbed of his coal miner grandfather filled the pages of two critically acclaimed books in the 1970s, died Aug. 27 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was 80.
His daughter Hillary Jury said the cause of death, in a hospital, was heart failure.
Jury’s first photo collection, “The Vietnam Photo Book” (1971), was one of the earliest to offer a visually unblinking view of what he called “the first and only rock ’n’ roll war,” by which he meant a conflict, at least on the American side, marked not by ideology or interests but by debauchery, moral corruption and pure desperation to survive.
By the time he arrived in South Vietnam as an Army photographer in 1969, the war had lost any sense of meaning for the hundreds of thousands of men and women fighting it. They fought well, he later wrote, but were also frequently drunk or stoned; peace signs and long hair proliferated.
Jury captured in film the nightmarish war that Michael Herr later wrote about in “Dispatches” (1977), his personal account as a war correspondent, and what Francis Ford Coppola depicted in “Apocalypse Now” (1979). As in the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” scene from early in that movie, Jury recalled being on a helicopter diving in for an attack, during which the pilot played the Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” over the radio.
“One day I would be at the command mess at Long Binh listening to the generals discuss the merits of the chef’s new baked Alaska,” he wrote, “and the next day I’d be out humping with the First Cavalry and someone would step on a mine.”
Jury took inspiration from war photographer Robert Capa, and after he returned home from his year in Vietnam, he sought out Capa’s brother, Cornell, himself a well-known photographer, for advice.
Capa was so taken with Jury’s work that he introduced him to his editor, whose initial skepticism melted before the blunt power of Jury’s photography.
The book was excerpted in Look magazine and promoted in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. Its first print run of 15,000 quickly sold out; a librarian at Cornell told Jury that his book was among the 10 most-stolen titles from the university’s shelves.
Jury followed up “The Vietnam Photo Book” with “Gramp” (1976), an account of his maternal grandfather’s struggle with dementia in his final years, which he wrote with his brother Dan.
The Jury brothers hadn’t planned to document the decline of their grandfather, a retired coal miner named Frank Tugend. But as they became more involved in his care, to the point of changing his diapers, they realized that they had been using their cameras as a psychological shield.
“If I had planned to do a book I would have done it right,” he told the Times in 1976. “In the last three weeks we did photograph seriously because the whole family felt part of something extraordinary. Gramp had such control over his death we felt like bit players.”
The book, among the first to capture an aspect of life that was still barely discussed publicly, was a Times bestseller and translated into eight languages.
“Their book shows us how, after all our emancipation, we still live in terror of the physical,” Anatole Broyard wrote in the Times. “Love, they imply, must be able to conquer disgust. Facing our disgust, coming to terms with it, is almost as important as facing our death.”
Mark Frank Jury was born July 4, 1944, in Monterey, California, where his father, Mark W. Jury, was deployed during World War II. Soon after, the family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father worked for the Red Cross and his mother, Anna (Tugend) Jury, ran the household.
He tried college, at Indiana University and at the University of St. Francis, in Fort Wayne, but higher education didn’t suit him. He traveled, living footloose at the dawn of the hippie era, and eventually took up a career as a freelance magazine photographer.
When he began receiving induction notices from the Army, he realized it would be better to enlist, where he’d have some control over his fate, than be drafted. As he had hoped, the Army assigned him to be a photographer, based on his experience — a noncombat role that nevertheless put him in the middle of the action.
“I would have a front-row seat watching history unfold,” he told PBS in 2019. “I wanted to see what would happen if I got into combat. Would I pee my pants, would I run the other way, or would I run with the troops toward the bang bang?”
He married Delores Vinson in 1968. Along with his daughter, she survives him, as do their sons, Joshua and Nicholas; their daughter Kristen Prachar; eight grandchildren; his brothers, Dan and Richard; and his sister, Lynne Isenberger.
Jury’s books ensured him of a long career as an in-demand magazine photographer. He wrote a third book of photography, “Playtime!” (1977), about American leisure activities. He also expanded into documentary filmmaking with his brother Dan; their work includes “Chillysmith Farm” (1981), about their grandfather, and “Dances Sacred and Profane” (1985), about American subcultures.
By the early 1990s, however, Jury was beginning to experience what his psychiatrist called late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder. Memories of the war came screaming back. He salved his pain with alcohol. His work declined. He considered suicide. He struggled to right himself, and eventually did in the late 2010s.
“Vietnam,” he told PBS, “caught up with me.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
