Ashcraft dies at age 65 - Photographer pursued visual truths

By Nick Grabbe
Staff Writer

Published on December 02, 2005

Barr G. Ashcraft left Amherst in his 20s to travel in Asia as a photojournalist and teacher.

When he returned a decade later, the experience had made him a pacifist who believed Americans must understand history if they are to avoid seeing their leaders abuse power.

Ashcraft, 65, died of cancer Oct. 30 at his home in Shutesbury.

He never forgot the years he spent in Vietnam, documenting the war's effect on people. His photographs appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Life and National Geographic - and most recently in an exhibit last spring at the University of Massachusetts called ''The Waste of War.''

And he never forgot his time as a swimmer and runner at the educational institutions he attended. He endowed scholarships for student athletes at Northfield-Mount Hermon School, Wake Forest University and UMass.

''While he delighted in playing the role of a crusty Yankee, on the inside, he was a man of remarkable talent and curiosity,'' said his friend, attorney Richard Evans of Northampton. ''His experience in Vietnam equipped him with a fierce skepticism about power and authority. He believed adamantly that the best protection against abuse of power lay in education and through an understanding of history.''

Ashcraft got his first Brownie camera from his mother when he was 8. She gave him a photo enlarger when he was 12. He was a reporter for his school newspapers, but his career goal was to be a military officer.

He went to Amherst schools but graduated from what was then Mt. Hermon School. He was an ROTC cadet and athlete at Wake Forest, graduating in 1964, and earned a master's degree from UMass in 1966.

He taught in Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia, and traveled in Africa and the Mideast, before going to Vietnam, where he started taking photographs. When he saw what other photographers produced, he said to himself, ''I can do better than that,'' he recalled recently.

He wound up taking 12,000 of them and became a pacifist.

''War is not simply the killing of young men,'' he said in 1995. ''It's capitalizing on young males' hormones, at a time when they have to prove themselves by a test, when they are less discriminating than older men.''

His photographs often looked at people facing death. In 1973, he had his own near-death experience when the helicopter he was on was shot down in the Gulf of Tonkin. He spent seven hours in the water about 15 miles from shore before being picked up by an American helicopter. He left Vietnam when Saigon fell in 1975, and for 10 years didn't look at his photographs.

He moved to Belchertown and became a carpenter and builder of log homes. He also gave lectures throughout the U.S. and Canada, encouraging people to look directly at the impact of war on cultures.

On Feb. 8, 1995, while he was traveling out of state, his house burned down. Ashcraft lost most of the 20,000 negatives of his photographs.

''Things are ephemeral and there are no guarantees,'' he said later. ''Freaks of nature have a way of letting us know that we're not in control.''

Ashcraft was struck by the changes in the physical and social landscape of his home town, and gave vent to these feelings in several columns in the Amherst Bulletin.

In 1998, he wrote that Amherst had shifted ''from being a sleepy, friendly, self-reliant community within a pastoral, bucolic splendor to a frenetic, intense, computer-driven, mall-saturated, service-demanding assemblage of households for the well-to-do.''

Last year, he wrote, ''The surplus of posturing prima donnas that abound in Amherst now is hardly a lure for those of us nurtured in calmer times.''

In the last three years of his life, Ashcraft swam frequently at UMass and became a mentor to a group of Chinese-American students.

Ashcraft, who was born June 8, 1940 in Adrian, Mich., never married.

He was the son of the late Pearl (Gallup) Wentworth and Wesley J. Wentworth, and is survived by three brothers: Robert Ashcraft of Walhalla, S.C., Peter Ashcraft of Charlotte, N.C. and Blake Ashcraft of St. Petersburg, Fla. He is also survived by two step-brothers, Wesley Wentworth of Seoul, South Korea, and Steven Wentworth of Tennessee; and a step-sister, Sylvia Wentworth Ryan of Houston, Texas.

Ashcraft was buried in Wildwood Cemetery. His family put off an announcement of his death for a month because of concerns over the security of his house, said Peter Ashcraft.

A celebration of his life is being planned at Northfield Mt. Hermon in May.