NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 3/10/05

CONTACT: LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATION ASST., (413) 545-0162

AMHERST PHOTOJOURNALIST'S VIETNAM WAR PHOTOS EXHIBIT NOW OPEN

“THE WASTE OF WAR; Vietnam , 1972-1975”

Barr G. Ashcraft, Photojournalist

     Amherst , MA – An exhibition of Photojournalist, Barr Ashcraft's Vietnam-era photographs are on display through April 10, 2005, on the Garden Level of the Du Bois Library.

     Barr Ashcraft is originally from Amherst and has an M.A. in history from UMass Amherst, according to a 2002 article from UMass Magazine. He traveled extensively throughout Japan and Malaysia for six years writing and photographing. “I was a gypsy and just loved it,” he says now. He spent three years photographing the conflict in Vietnam in the early ‘70's. “ Vietnam was the last war that journalists could cover easily,” Ashcraft says. “If you had initiative you could do anything.”

     His images have appeared in Life, National Geographic, Newsweek, and Time, as well as newspapers and magazines around the world.

     “Given my travels in the Middle East, Africa and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, I have been in both the cauldrons of combat and the Gardens of Eden,” he says in a narrative that accompanies the exhibit. “Usually I have preferred the cauldrons, NOT because I like them but because the cauldrons are an honest focus that forces awareness and responses…this focus is what I call ‘Confrontation with the Darker Side' of the human animal.”

     Ashcraft's photographs are disturbing and moving, yet composed to please the eye. “I like to put the ugly with the beautiful, in juxtaposition with each other,” he says. He challenges us as viewers to face the horrific scenes and to confront our complicity in the bloodshed.

     Ashcraft has been back in the Amherst area since 1975. He went into business with his father, W.J. Wentworth, Jr., as a building contractor in the family business. He eventually ran the business and recently retired after 25 years. In 1995, a fire destroyed his home, along with thousands of his photographs, negatives, notes and a 300 page memoir of his Vietnam experiences. All that remains of the fire are 106 photographs. This exhibit is a selection of the images that survived.