Dreams of peace: Remembering TL Times photographer Lance Woodruff

On a balmy evening in Saigon in April 2025, Lance Woodruff sat at a busy sidewalk café reflecting on his long connection to Vietnam as motorcycles buzzed by. At 81, he told Vietnamese-American journalist Vũ Hoàng Lân, he felt more at home in Vietnam than almost anywhere in the United States. “I would be at peace to die here,” he said. Less than a year later, on Jan. 5, 2026, he was gone.

For many, Lance was known for his striking photographs from Vietnam and Laos during the 1960s. But a pivotal — and less known — period of his life took place not in Southeast Asia, but in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district through his years at the Tenderloin Times newspaper during the 1980s.

I first met Lance in 1986, when I was an editor at the Tenderloin Times. I offered him a job as staff photographer after seeing a powerful exhibition of his work from the 1960s titled “Dreams of Peace: An Indochina Retrospective.” I was struck by the quiet intensity of his images, which we featured in a full-page spread in the Times.

Witness to war

Carrying two Pentax cameras and a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder, Lance first arrived in Vietnam in April 1966 as a 23-year-old correspondent for the U.S. National Council of Churches. His focus wasn’t combat, but the everyday lives of civilians living in the shadow of war: a Buddhist monk walking on a dusty road in Laos, children behind barbed wire in Quang Ngai, refugees taking shelter in a Saigon pagoda.

Though he wasn’t seeking combat, he still saw it up close. In March 1967, he flew aboard an A-1E Skyraider dive bomber as it dropped bombs and napalm on the Ho Chi Minh Trail west of Pleiku. The pilot received a distress call that a downed U.S. helicopter was on fire and surrounded by North Vietnamese artillery positions. Out of bombs, the Skyraider repeatedly dived, firing its fixed wing cannon directly at the targets. “Soldiers on the ground shooting at my aircraft filled the air with tracers. I shot back with my cameras, blindly,” Lance would later write. “I looked death in the face and saw nothing pretty about it.”

Yet when he left Vietnam in 1968, he believed he had failed to truly “see” the war because he hadn’t been a combat photographer.

For almost 20 years, his Vietnam images remained largely unseen.

That changed in 1986. Lance’s San Francisco exhibition — and joining the Times — marked a turning point in his life, he later told me. It was the first public recognition of his work since leaving Vietnam, and the moment he finally recognized that he, too, was a veteran of the American War in Vietnam — not because he had fought, but because he had witnessed.

Contemplative journalist, in San Francisco’s heart

We were incredibly lucky to have Lance at the Tenderloin Times. Until his departure in 1990, the gritty inner-city neighborhood provided a natural beat for him: Southeast Asian refugees, Vietnam veterans, homeless people, self-taught artists and poets, and folks on the front lines of the emerging AIDS crisis.

“I was invited to pick up my camera again for the Tenderloin Times, which challenged me to document people and their lives at the heart and in the soul of San Francisco,” he later commented in an essay.

The Tenderloin Times published in English, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Lao to serve the waves of Southeast Asian refugees rebuilding their lives alongside longtime residents facing poverty, addiction, and eviction. Lance’s photographs of Juneteenth celebrations, of isolated elderly people living in residential hotels, and of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge accompanied articles in all four languages.

Lance was thoughtful, deeply spiritual, and profoundly affected by the people and places he photographed. He treated every subject with respect. “I am a contemplative journalist,” he once wrote, “a photo-iconographer, believing in showing the sacred and holy in each person.”

While it took a quick phone call to review proof sheets with other photographers, I knew to set aside at least an hour with Lance. Each image, person, and story resonated deeply with him, beautifully reflected in the eight-by-ten images he printed in his home darkroom.

Before long, the Tenderloin Times became Lance’s family of choice. He was deeply moved in 1989 when veterans, refugees, artists, and poets organized a Tenderloin benefit to help send him back to Vietnam with his two sons — a spiritual homecoming for him and a powerful history lesson for them.

Their Vietnam itinerary included a visit to a statue of the elephant-headed deity Ganesh in Danang that Lance had photographed during his first trip out of Saigon in 1966. At that time, South Vietnamese troops were suppressing a Buddhist uprising in central Vietnam. They had taken over the city’s Cham Museum, stringing their hammocks between sculptures more than a thousand years old.

One image stayed with him: There was Ganesh, “with rifles on either shoulder,” Lance later wrote in an article for the Tenderloin Times. The scene, he said, “was burned into my mind, my memory and my dreams.”

Over the years Lance thanked me more than once for asking him to join the Times. “You opened doors for a series of central life experiences for me,” he told me. In a 2018 article, Lance wrote, “I accepted her cautious invitation and then I did the best work of my life during the next four years.”

Lance’s Tenderloin Times photographs still stand as a powerful record of that time and place, archived today at the San Francisco Main Library and in the Tenderloin Times Photograph Archives online.

Bridging enemies, honoring those overlooked

Born on Sept. 10, 1943, Lance grew up in Salem, Ohio, and majored in history and political science at Macalester College in Minnesota. As part of his studies, he spent two years based in Tanzania and other parts of East Africa, where his first international byline was his coverage of the 1963 Zanzibar elections for the monthly magazine Central African Parade.

After Vietnam and the Tenderloin, from 1991 on he was largely based in Bangkok, where he worked as a freelancer, information officer for the Mekong River Commission, and development director for the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. He had two sons, Alex and Chris, and a daughter, Hannah. In 2016, Lance and Hannah relocated to Philadelphia for her high school years.

Our paths continued to intersect through the 1990s and early 2000s when we were both based in Southeast Asia. In 1995, Lance documented an environmental study tour I led in northern Thailand for Southeast Asian reporters from nations on all sides of the Indochina wars, sponsored by the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation (IMMF). Lance said he valued his ongoing involvement with IMMF as a chance to be a “media bridge builder between former enemies and people — soldiers and civilians on all sides of conflict — who had fallen through the cracks.”

I especially appreciated our later encounters and emails, when Lance seemed more engaged and less self-absorbed — and often very funny. In November 2018, then living in Bangkok, he sent me a story that only Lance could tell about how termites had eaten many of his photo files and a Robert Olen Butler novel I’d given him. He hauled the box of remains into a courtyard shaded by a tamarind tree, whose leaves had long flavored his wife’s soups. He poured kerosene over the box crawling with insects and set it afire. A year or two later, his neighbors — “who did not approve of trees” — poured gasoline over the tree’s roots. “In the morning we awakened to a leafless tamarind, its greenery carpeting the lake,” Lance wrote. “I used a ceremonial sword bestowed by Khun Sa to cut down our faithful servant.”

In 2020, Lance joined me on a panel celebrating the Tenderloin Times and the transfer of its photographic archives to the San Francisco Main Library. Revisiting his 1980s work, he commented in an email to me: “In some sense, my San Francisco images — mostly Tenderloin-focused — are probably more coherent than my Vietnam material.”

We met one last time in 2023, at a memorial in Washington, D.C., for fellow foreign correspondent Nate Thayer. Sporting a white beard, Lance was warm, funny, quite jolly even, as he joked and shot candid photos on his phone. I was amazed that at age 80, he’d taken the train and the Metro from Philadelphia to Dupont Circle to be there.

In April 2025, Lance returned to Vietnam for the 50th anniversary of the Communist victory, completing the journey he began in 1966. That was when he sat down with journalist Vũ Hoàng Lân, as I first mentioned. Covering a war is much more than documenting military operations, he said. “When we talk about war in terms of battles, you miss the point of a lot of it,” he said. For Lance, war was what happened to civilians, to memory, and to cultures. That early work in Vietnam shaped his lifelong dedication to bearing witness, connecting former enemies, and telling the stories of people on the margins.

Lance never forgot the people he photographed; he carried their stories with him throughout his life. He knew that each photo told a story, and that every story was important. The world has lost an extraordinary artist and witness, and I’ve lost a respected colleague and friend.