Britain

In early January 1968, Philip was briefly back in London and had to move in to a new flat. He was packing the car, loading it with bags and boxes, running up and down the stairs. By the time he got back downstairs, a suitcase, filled to the brim with negatives and prints, was gone. This suitcase, still lost to this day, contained a large chunk of Philip’s early career. Philip didn’t have much time to dwell on this loss before getting on a plane back to Vietnam to cover the Tet Offensive. But the loss of this suitcase was still something that stung many years later, very little of his early work having survived. Until a day in the mid-2000s when, he got a call from The Observer. They’d had a locked filing cabinet in their office for decades, completely ignored. One day someone finally took a crowbar to it and found envelope after envelope of Philip’s work. Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. What is lost is not necessarily gone.