Smithsonian Institution. Traveling Exhibition Service

Biographical Information

Geoffrey Clifford’s photographic work has earned him international acclaim. His award-winning photographs have appeared in a number of books, magazines, and other publications worldwide. Monographs of his work include Vietnam: The Land We Never Knew (Chronicle Books, 1989) and The Last Days, still photography taken during the filming of James Moll’s Academy Award-winning documentary, produced by Steven Spielberg (St. Martin’s Press, 1999.)

Clifford served as an army lieutenant during the Vietnam War. In Vietnam he flew helicopter combat and supply missions out of Chu Lai and Da Nang. After his return to the United States, he studied photography and film making, earning a degree in motion picture production at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California.

In 1985, Clifford was included in one of the first groups of U.S. Veterans to visit postwar Vietnam, becoming one of the first Americans to photograph there since the War. Since 1985, Clifford has returned to Vietnam nearly twenty times. He is one of the first foreigners to have traveled the entire length of Vietnam, from the Chinese border in the north to the southern swamps of the Ca Mau Peninsula.

In 1989, Chronicle Books published Clifford’s work, Vietnam: The Land We Never Knew, with a preface by Clifford and text by author John Balaban. In 1998, U.S. Congressmen Tom Lantos and Eni Faleomavaega sponsored an exhibition of Geoffrey Clifford’s Vietnam photographs in the Cannon Rotunda on Capitol Hill.

From the guide to the Vietnam: Journey of the heart, 1985-2000, (The Bancroft Library)