Photography is a way for me to travel back in time. To see history through the eyes of the photographer. Everyone has there own way to tell a story, and evoking emotions.
When I frame an image I try to have everything I want inside the frame and everything I don’t want out of the frame. It’s not that I don’t agree with cropping but why not skip that step if you frame your shot properly.
A camera is a way to freeze a moment in time, the good and the bad. It’s like having a superhero power. Freezing time would be my superhero power if I had one.
My name is Michael Groissl. I’ve was brought up in upstate New York. For the people that don’t know, upstate New York is not New York City. As a child I was always outdoors doing anything from hiking, climbing trees, swimming, etc.
My first camera I had was a Polaroid IZone. It was a green instant film camera. I thought this was the coolest thing I could have gotten for Christmas that year. Years later I saw my friends taking 35mm film black and white photos and developing photos in the darkroom.
Photography is a medium that I’ve fallen in love with it. I feel that I can really express myself through this medium.
I was fascinated with the pictures they were taking and knew this was something I want to get into. So I bought my first Pentax film camera and a few rolls of film. I took a few classes to learn how to develop film and photos. I loved every about it from the smell of the darkroom to the creative and technical process of taking a photo. This was my first real introduction to photography.
My mother asked me, “What I wanted to do when I was older?” I told her, “ I wanted to move far away from the United States and live in another country.” It was always a dream of mine to experience how other people live in this world. I would always see beautiful pictures of places far away and knew I would see these places one day.
Later on, I joined the United States Navy. I was an (AD) Aviation Machinist Mate. This was my first opportunity to travel abroad. After finishing my training in the United States I was stationed with VFA-27 in Atsugi, Japan. I couldn’t have been happier to live in another country. Taking the opportunity to travel and take pictures around Japan and documenting the workplace on land and sea.
Photography is a medium that I’ve fallen in love with it. I feel that I can really express myself through this medium. I’ve tried other mediums but for me the best way to express myself through a creative way is photography.
The project I’m currently working on is a photo book called Daily Life in Northern Vietnam – The North. I choose this project because of my love towards this country and the people in it! The book is divided into three parts landscapes, cities, and people to show daily life in Northern Vietnam.
The photo book is a 30×30 soft cover, in both colour and black & white, printed on high-quality paper from Japan. The book is in both English and Vietnamese. Everything about Vietnam has inspired me to do this project.
From the beautiful, kind, and generous people, the stunning mountains and the hustle and bustle of the cities. The real question is there anything that Vietnam can’t inspire you to do?
The biggest obstacle I faced was myself. I am my own worst enemy when it comes to perfection in my photography. A lot of times a photo will be great but in my mind, it’s not good enough for my expectations.
I capture all of these photos over the last two years around the Northern regions of Vietnam. My friends from high school made me fall in love with photography. I would see all the hard work and creativity they would put into it and made me want to do the same.
Anthony Bourdain has inspired me to do a lot including my photography. I would see the passion he would put into his work and I wanted to do the same with photography.
In the next few years, I hope to see myself still travelling the world and documenting different cultures, landscapes and people through my lens. I have also started to pick up a new hobby in filming so I would like to see this myself completing more projects in filming too.
My advice I would give other artist is keep following your passion. Someone will appreciate the beauty of your creative work. The hardest part of this assignment was cutting the book down to 200 pages.
There are still so many pictures I would have liked to include. On the other hand, this gives me a good excuse to start another project with the pictures. I would like to start a project more local next about the beautiful city of Hanoi but I’ll take one project at a time for now.
When I frame the image I try to look at the foreground, middle ground and background. I also think about what it is I want to see in the image beforehand.
A camera is a tool.
My name is Loes Heerink, 29 years old. I was born and raised in the Netherlands. I bought a Sony when I was 19.
There was a dragonfly in my parents garden and I thought it was so beautiful. I wanted to enjoy it in the winter too so I decided to buy a camera. I spent days in my parents’ pond to take a photo of it, like literally in the pond. I realised dragonflies fly in some kind of pattern. I picked a nice spot and waited patiently. When it finally sat down and I knew I got the settings right I was so happy! I never really put the camera down after that. I learned how to shoot in manually years after. Probably somewhere in 2014.
What made you choose this project? When I first arrived in Vietnam in 2011 I immediately liked the street vendors. All the colours. But more importantly all the stuff they carry on their cycles! I am from the Netherlands. My family owes more bicycles then it counts people. I also have two cycles. I was impressed. I wanted to take a picture of the vendors without any of the distraction of the city on the background. Just the vendors.
While waiting on the bridges I got a glimpse into the lives of the vendors. They all seem to know each other, make a chat and walk on again. The vendors really inspired me.
As much as I like Hanoi, the hustle and bustle just seemed a distraction to the vendors. So I decided to go up, take a higher vantage point. While waiting on the bridges I got a glimpse into the lives of the vendors. They all seem to know each other, make a chat and walk on again.
The vendors really inspired me. They are so kind and every single one of them I spoke to let me into their lives and told me their story. I think street vendors make Hanoi the city that it is. It is so convenient, plus all the colours! I hope in ten years, or twenty years there will still be street vendors in Hanoi.
What was the main obstacle you faced? Not a lot, rainy days maybe. And sometimes no vendors walked past the bridge for hours.
When and where did you capture these images? In 2015 from August to December and in March 2017.
What made you fall in love with photography? The thrill of chasing good pictures. I really like that moment when you know you got the shot you have been thinking of. With the vendors series, it took me some months to get a flower vendor on a picture, when I finally saw a flower vendor approach I was ready for the shot, I took the shot and I knew it was a good shot! I was so happy!
Who inspire you? French photographer Rehanh, Hans Kemp of course. But also Chris Burkhard and Pie Aerts.
Where do you see yourself going within the next few years? I don’t know. I will just continue walking on my photography projects like I am doing now. We will see where it leads. Or not leads 🙂
What is your advice to other artists? You can only get better. Each time I go out photographing I grow as a photographer. Looking back at my pictures I try to think about what makes it good or what could I have done to make it better.
Photography is for me the extension of an intense but elusive emotion of Beauty in the world. I am captivated by the power of an image (photographic or not), in love with it and being able to create one is the most exhilarating thing I know.
When I frame the image I sometimes find myself overthinking geometry, lines, or directions. This may be the result of having taught the same photography classes for too long.
A camera is a poetic device.
Photography is my happy place. Light and Time and Space. How they intertwine together is so much more than pushing a button. The Light moves me so deeply, I could almost cry, it makes me feel it all so much more. Photography freezes time, holds it still on the surface while digging deep in the human consciousness to expose our relation to memories and time passing by.
All of this, contained in the space of a frame. How you arrange the elements, the decisions you make about depth, what you do about the off-camera is just as important as what you put in. All of this resonates within me.
I came to Vietnam in 2010 initially for a three months trip, and after three weeks I decided not to return home. This is somehow a common story you hear among foreigners in Vietnam.
I am out there in front of the world, from the fringe looking at it, and at the same time I am fully engaged in it, I am all in. I came to Vietnam in 2010 initially for a three months trip, and after three weeks I decided not to return home. This is somehow a common story you hear among foreigners in Vietnam.
What makes my story a little different though is the strong familial bond that I have with Hanoi. My grandfather was born in Hanoi from a French family established in colonial Vietnam since at least 1880; he grew up here as well as his sister. In 1950 he was sent to Vietnam as a surgeon to run a field hospital north of Hue. He left Vietnam before the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
About his childhood, I have very few details as he rarely talked about it. After he passed away, my family discovered, forgotten on a shelf for decades, old photo albums. These came from my grandfather’s own grandfather.
As a photographer, I naturally became very interested in these. There were a lot of photos of the railway construction he worked on. But it was the landscape photos that I liked the most. These old black and white landscape where the only images I had purposely looked at before coming to Vietnam. I did not want to look at modern images to not spoil the surprise.
I wanted a cultural shock to shake my preconceived ideas. And what a shock it was, that did not stop me from falling deeply in love with the country. My first camera was a Minolta SLR my parents had given me when I was 16 years old, I think. My dad is an amateur watercolour artist who can draw well. I always wanted to do the same but could not draw as well as him and very early on I got self-conscious about it and stopped pursuing it.
I liked the idea of photography though; taking photos was a lot more pleasant. I could easily capture the moments when I would feel something strongly about seeing the world. I played around for a bit but I had no idea what it was really all about. I really started learning the craft later in the USA during a year abroad program. I had teachers who were very supportive of my work and without whom I would not be here today. They gave me the confidence to go study first in a Fine Art school and later on in a photography school.
Vietnam in Cyanotypes is a collection of some of my favourite photos of Vietnam and its people. They come from almost a decade of exploring Vietnam on assignment, as a traveller and as a resident of this beautiful country. I chose to use a 19th-century cyanotype printing technique.
At first, I used cyanotype mainly as an experiment but quickly it re-established an analogue and handcrafting aspect in my photography process that I had back in school and that I had put aside when I took digital photography. The cyanotype process was one of the first non-silver technologies used to create photographic images that originated in 1842 after Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure.
The typical procedure is to create the sensitizer with a mix of equal part green ferric ammonium solution and potassium ferricyanide solution. Despite the chemical sounding names, these products are not dangerous. Once the sensitizer is ready you can apply the solution onto paper, or fabric (or any porous surface really). Let it dry completely in the dark. The cyanotype process is a negative photo process, black will become white and white/transparency will be blue. You can choose an object (like a Rayogram), a flower, a drawing on transparent paper or a photo negative (anything you want really).
I use two large pieces of glass to make sure the paper stays flat. Finally, you put the sensitized paper under sunlight or UV light and let it be exposed until the yellow/green colour turns into grey/bronze.
Exposure time varies depending on the light source. Once exposed, rinse the paper under running water until clear, now your cyanotype is blue. Let it dry. Sir John Herschel did not intend to use cyanotype for photography, but as a copying technique. The cyanotype processes were widely used to create copies of technical and architectural plans and were called blueprints.
These photos, in their monochrome format, are, in a way, my blueprints of Vietnam and its people. The print simplicity and yet depth give a dreamy aspect to the photos. They add a layer of poetry, one that extends beyond the content within the frame. It abstracts the photos from their mundane context and gathers them under a poetic evocation of my memories.
Photography to me means telling visual stories of humanity and love.
When I frame the image, I try to create an imperfect – romantic photograph.
A camera is a moment keeper.
Vuong Nguyen is my name and Saigon is my hometown. I am a photographer, an artist and a self-taught filmmaker; recently I’m studying Visual Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Regarding photography, I’ve taken photographs for more than 5 years, the very first chance for me to use a camera is when I went out on a road trip to Long Hai in Ba Ria provide with my friend, she lent me her camera, and it was a Canon 60D, we took many photos of the sunrise and the ocean.
I still remember precisely the beauty of that moment, when I was gazing at the large yellow light that is slowly coming out from the horizon of the ocean, the sun of that time was like a massive fireball in my taken photos.
I still remember precisely the beauty of that moment, when I was gazing at the large yellow light that is slowly coming out from the horizon of the ocean, the sun of that time was like a massive fireball in my taken photos. Therefore, I was fell in love with photography from that day.
So, taking photo became my biggest hobby, I got for myself a Nikon D90 which is also my first camera; I spent much time just hanging out Saigon and some places to take pictures. Taking photographs means you can freeze special moments that happening around you. I would say photography is a ticket for you to become a time traveller whenever you have a look through all your pictures you have taken.
Since then I’m having for myself more than five cameras including digital and analogue ones. Now I’m using mostly is Nikon F5 and Nikon FM II which are amazing cameras. Lover of no one is the newest photographic series of mine; I used an analogue camera which was Nikon FM II with Rollei 35mm film to capture pictures of street life in Sydney. Also with photos in black and white, there is more contrast of deep feeling that I want to give the viewers.
Moreover, Lover of no one also is a recognition of a disconnected society. Even though Sydney is a most crowded city in the world, but somehow, I found the emptiness, loneliness of people in modern society. Each person is invisible to another, and there is no contact, not much engagement between people.
It was challenging when I decided to make the series, and there was two big obstacle that I faced. Firstly, my biggest question was how can I put strong human emotions into photographs? It was difficult to describe my feeling by photographing, so when I took a photo for the Lover of no one, I applied different compositions and techniques.
You can see some of the pictures are made by using long exposure photographic technique. Secondly, always be carefully adjust a camera because I was using Nikon FM II, not like a digital camera I could not see photos after taking it, so understanding of photography technique is essential.
When I have been studying deeper both practical and theoretical lessons in photography, I love photography more. The deeper understanding about photography, the fewer photos I take, I think due to my philosophy of photography has been changed. Therefore, I’m using analogue cameras instead of using digital ones.
Using film cameras help you to calm yourself and you must understand your camera before taking photos. Otherwise, the images from an analogue camera, for me, is more valuable, not only about the process of developing the negative but also about the narrative of each photo cause sometimes you have a roll of film that’s mean 23 or 36 times to take a photo.
So, you must have thought about the moment you should or should not photographing. Honestly, I was inspired a lot by the works of Fan Ho, Saul Leiter, Stephen Dupont and Sebastiao Salgado. They are all great photographer. Every time that I feel lost, need the motivation to create a new project, always look at their works as a simple way for me to recharge energy.
The next few years I think I could challenge myself in cinemaphotography. I could apply photography knowledge into making a film because I think a connection between photography and filmmaking is a very close gap.
If I have a chance to advise another one who wants to become a photographer, I would have two sentences to send out: – “Understand your camera and believe in your eyes”. – “Your first camera is for practising, but your last one is to tell stories.”
Photography is the best way I found to communicate.
When I frame the image I ask myself if another angle would have been better.
A camera is another tool.
I’m a French artist (mostly photographer), father of two, nature enthusiast and adrenaline lover. Self-taught in almost everything I do. I might be hyperactive, but I’m not sure yet. During teenage-hood, I went through drawing, painting, tattooing… to finally find my way to photography.
I bought a Nikon Coolpix 5000 to shoot my work back when I was tattooing. I quickly felt better with a camera in hands than a tattoo gun. We don’t realize how stressing it can be to ink someone for life. So I decided to sell my tattoo gears to my best friend to buy a better camera.
From there, I started to learn photography and never stopped learning. Never stop shooting either. Once I felt good enough with that new tool I decided I could try to make a living in photography. I shot a lot of outdoor sports like snowboard, free ski, mountain bike or slackline. I had a great time doing that because I was myself a big outdoor sports enthusiast.
Most of my works include photography, although I love to try new stuff. Lately, I spent some time designing and screen printing tees.
At the same time, I was working on other projects, mainly portraits and light painting. Most of my works include photography, although I love to try new stuff. Lately, I spent some time designing and screen printing tees. I must be a kind of Swiss army knife artist.
Several ongoing projects are based on other mediums than photography. I work on a book with an illustrator friend. It is about tales and legends from Alsace, our homeland.
I’m also about to start a collaboration with a sailboat expedition named ATKA. I’ll be working with kids on Arctic endangered animals and light painting.
Besides, I have a full-time job at Slack.fr where I’m a designer, illustrator and photographer. No chance I get bored before a while…
This project is called “Rồng Di Sản, Dragon Legacy”. I wasn’t looking for that kind of ethnologic project when I started. But I met a young tour guide in Sapa who pushed me in. We were drinking together every evening for almost a week.
We became friends as we gave English lessons to the kids from some nearby villages. He invited me to visit his home in Ha Giang Province to meet different minorities and take some portraits. I was staying in Hanoi and wasn’t really busy so decided to follow him.
And that trip was actually epic. We were both riding a single bike all around the mountains of Ha Giang. We weren’t travelling light as I was carrying a lot of gears. I knew how I wanted to picture these people with their traditional costumes, no matter the logistic…
We drove around the province for a week, met a dozen of different ethnic groups, drank more riu than we should, we were invited to a wedding, twice, ate dog, also twice, we drank even more riu to finally end at the jumping fire festival in Tân Bắc, Quang Bình, surrounded by more people than I could count. It was a very special experience for me. I met numerous people within that week and portrayed thirty of them.
It was a great week and a wonderful time. Although it was sometimes tough. It was the first time I shot total strangers with such a difference of culture. I mean not in “holiday travel” way. If I never had the feeling of having a lack of respect while I was shooting, I mostly felt uncomfortable to “buy” the pictures I was taking.
I first thought it would be an exchange, but I didn’t realize I had nothing to give. But money… Once back in Hanoi, I decided to print the pictures of every “model” and send them to my friend in Ha Giang, he would be the postman from there. Unfortunately, the pictures never arrived at him.
I felt bad about that and realized I was not quite prepared to do these photos the way I wanted. Understand in an ethically correct way. But the photos were good, the experience was however enriching. I also had an encouraging feedback from the Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi that pushed me to continue the project.
Two years later I was once again on a motorbike with my friend’s cousin and all my gears, going on an adventure across Loa Cai, Lai Chau, Dien Bien, Son Là and other provinces of the northern region of Vietnam. I brought my Hasselblad 500cm with a Polaroid back to make some pictures I could give to the models.
The Polaroids were quite successful, what makes me happy too because I finally had something to share. In 2014, I realized I had more to share and to learn. Thanks to Mr Vinh. Vinh is a tour guide in his 60’s I met in 2014 in KonTum. We only spent two days together but we quickly liked each other.
Vinh is from the Bah Nar minority and a well of knowledge about the minorities of Central Highlands and the southern region of Vietnam. He proposed to help me plan my last journey across the southern part of the country and I met him again in 2015 for the last part of my project.
During the long talks that we were used to having, I understood the meaning of that project. It seems obvious that these photos are some still memories of Vietnamese traditions. People from the minorities wear more and more western clothes, keeping the traditional costumes only for ceremonies or special occasions.
I grew up in Alsace, a part of France were traditions were strong. In one hand, it remains a fantastic architectural heritage, but in the other hand my generation is not speaking our dialect anymore, the last traditional costumes were worn a century from now.
Most of our culture is now to be found in museums. The strong and living heritage in Vietnam probably helped me realized how much we lost in Europe. It’s without any nostalgia that I went through that project. It rather made me realized and appreciate how rich and fragile was the culture I was witnessing.
A project means a chance to learn something new – a good one is always worth more than the sum of its parts.
When I build I am looking for some chemistry between a material and a story or concept.
A story is a very slippery thing with far too many angles.
My name’s Ben, I come from Snowdonia – a very beautiful, rural part of Wales in the United Kingdom. As a kid I was obsessed with gods and monsters and spent all my time reading, drawing and building ridiculous dens and catapults. It seemed like a natural progression to channel all of these interests into a career in art – so I set my heart on becoming a serious painter.
Luckily for me, this idea was destroyed in college when I found out that I could spend all my time learning lots of different ‘small skills’ instead. I have not looked back since.
I moved to HCMC to teach art over 3 years ago – it was a big deal for me travelling to Vietnam, it would be my first time living in a big city. Since then I have fallen hard for the pure scale, opportunity and mesh of cultures that is Saigon.
I particularly enjoy the range and availability of materials – from scrap on street corners to the huge fabric, metal and paper markets. Most of my time is spent salvaging, fixing, breaking and building things in my workshop in Bình Thạnh while working as an art teacher, freelance artist and fabricator.
My art practice consists of many different disciplines. Right now I’m really interested in mixing sculpture, costume and animation to explore ideas of identity and background. I tend to use a combination of different media to play with a story or idea, often twisting something traditional by mixing it with something current.
I draw a lot of inspiration from artists like Charles Avery and Cornelia Parker who use a huge range of objects and practices in their work.
The Kitsuné project started as a tribute to the female role models in my life, mixed with elements of a shape-shifting character from Japanese folklore. I made a collection of sculptures and animation machines that changed and shifted depending on movement and light; I loved the idea of building something delicate that could take on a fierce or independent character.
The problem was that by focusing on the changing persona of the character, I ended up highlighting a common trope in the mythology of female characters being untrustworthy, alien and imbalanced – contrary to the very core of the project.
However, after finishing these pieces, I quickly became dissatisfied with the results. The problem was that by focusing on the changing persona of the character, I ended up highlighting a common trope in the mythology of female characters being untrustworthy, alien and imbalanced – contrary to the very core of the project. I also began to question if there was any way to carry the project forward without reinforcing an outsider’s view on femininity and womanhood. What did I, as a middle-class white boy, know about being a woman in modern-day Vietnam?
The simplest answer seemed to be to ask people who would know better, so I opened the project up. It is now a growing communal piece. Using the same mix of bamboo and nylon I built a semi-transparent fox mask – something that would half reveal and half blur the subject’s identity with that of the Kitsuné fox. Each subject is then photographed with the Kitsuné mask and answers 2 questions.
Her response is added to a growing anonymous archive of thoughts and opinions from a variety of women across Vietnam. There are only 2 conditions: – Subject identifies as female/feminine – Subject must have spent at least a year living in Vietnam. The project is ongoing. if you or someone you know if interested in joining, drop me an email.
When I frame the image: I sometimes frame my photos, but very rarely, I always try to frame the image in my lens.
A camera is: A Nikon D300 17/55 mm lens, and a Nikon D610, lens: 50 mm, and 14/24 mm
Passionate about graphics, I went to Corvisart, an art college in Paris. After 4 years of art studies, I worked for several advertising agencies. There I met many advertising photographers who no doubt gave me a taste of photography.
Whilst doing my job as an Artistic Director, I practised photography more and more with my first Canon. At that time it was a film camera with Ilford film. Then, in the 1980s, I went to Asia, where my passion for travelling and photography developed. I travelled from India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore and of course Vietnam, my favourite.
The essential part for me was being at the heart of the Vietnamese population.
It’s almost 20 years now that I have travelled through Vietnam and photographed it from north to south, in it’s most remote corners. I am married to a Vietnamese woman from Hue. My wife and I worked for Franco-Vietnamese NGOs. That allowed us to be in direct contact with daily life and the authenticity of the country.
The essential part for me was being at the heart of the Vietnamese population. Living in the Khanh Hoa area, which I know very well, I decided to become a photography guide for major hotels in Nha Trang. 5 years of happiness where I guided many amateur photographers as well as professionals, of all nationalities.
From 1995 to 2018, I participated in many photo exhibitions in Paris and Vietnam. In 1997, one of my photos titled “In Bombay Station” was awarded at the “International Nikon Photo Contest” and exhibited at The European House of Photography in Paris. I now share my time between France and Vietnam.
My first “real” camera was a Canon FTB QL silver with Ilford 400 films, black and white. At the time the Canon brand was very popular in France. I followed the advice of my photographer friends who all worked with a Canon. But I must admit that one day I tried a Nikon. Ever since, for the last 30 years, I only work with Nikon, and of course for 10 years now, in digital.
Since returning to Paris, I have been working for a year on my new photographic concept called “Mes garçons de café parisiens” (My Parisian Coffee Boys) For 1 year I went through Parisian cafes in search of our “authentic coffee boys”. Still dressed in their traditional aprons, white shirts and bottle openers, proudly carried in the pocket of their black vests. Staying discrete is the concept and the main idea of my photographic work. Taking the snapshot, capturing the gestures, the dexterity, the skill with which they work, always in a dizziness of speed, whereas the customers, sitting quietly sip their black coffee. Putting aside the misconception of “unpleasant boys”, these men and women are for the most part the affable ambassadors of their cafés, caring about the hospitality of the establishment, playing with verbal expressions that belong only to them and tirelessly repeated, Parisian humour and even sometimes translated into bad English for our tourists who remain questionable or even doubtful.
Without them, Paris would not be Paris. The coffee boys of Paris (Mes garçons de café) have often been photographed, my concept is to photograph them, while staying very discrete, surprising them in their natural gestures, “not posed”, the difficulty is also to not show their faces, France has very strict image rights, unlike Vietnam.
Once my work is done, I will look for a publisher and publish a book on “Mes garçons de café” series and of course, organize photo exhibitions in Paris on this subject, in Asia too, because I know that the images of “Paris” and its Parisian cafes are very popular in Asian countries. The great photographers inspire me, SALGADO, MC CURRY, MAPLETHORPE, WILLY RONIS, ROBERT DOISNEAU. To look at their photos, to try to understand how their “photographic eye” works, that is my inspiration, they are my masters.
The biggest obstacle for a photographer is probably when a photographer must meet the commercial constraints of a customer. The work corresponding to one’s “eye” is not always that of the client. I have sometimes faced inconvenience, even a customer’s refusal of my photos that I found very good.
It is for this reason that I prefer to work on personal projects that will only have my personal censorship. All my photos are done in Paris when it comes to “Mes garçons de café”, as for my “BACK PHOTOGRAPHY” series, in Vietnam and Paris. To be in love with photography is to be in love with the image. Even without my camera in hand, my eye can not help framing the images. I am looking for the unusual image, photography is an obsession for me.
As I said above, great, real photographers, those who do not cheat with effects like photoshop and other software. The great masters of photography do not cheat. My wish is to continue to photograph Vietnam, France and why not other Asian countries. I also want to take part in many more photographic exhibitions with my work. It’s difficult to give advice. I would just tell young photographers, to “look” at the life around you, that’s how you will forge your photographic eye. The most difficult part for a photographer is patience. It takes years to understand and master “the” photographic eye. I think one cannot be a photographer without having taken thousands of photos.
I seldom experience that simple, laid back life that most people see when they travel to Vietnam. It’s all portrayed in my work — high contrast lighting, hectic, imperfect, but full of stories. Photography to you means: A tool like other art tools to help capture and express the stories as well as the human conditions.
When I frame the image: I think first of what story I want to tell. What is the message here?
A camera is: Just a box that records images, nothing more than an expensive tool.
I’m Francis, but my real Vietnamese name is Van Anh; Francis is a name I gave to myself as a persona to try to be an artist. Although my work is in photography, I try to include art influences into it. I don’t make snapshot images, but images made with stories and ideas behind them. Many of my images don’t look realistic, some, more like paintings.
That’s the world I want to create, more colourful, more exciting, somewhat like an escape from reality. I was born and raised in Saigon, even my parents were, so I’m very much a city person. I seldom experience that simple, laid back life that most people see when they travel to Vietnam. It’s all portrayed in my work — high contrast lighting, hectic, imperfect, but full of stories.
I love taking portraits and editorial fashion photos, there’s so much freedom in it to explore. I translate how you see the world in pictures. I also get to meet and work with a lot of people, get to know their lives. With portraits, few people have ever had their portraits taken. Their reaction, when I show them how I perceive them, is always interesting. It’s not a walk in the park, but giving people the experience of their portraits taken is always a thing I’d want to do.
My first camera was a Canon 500D with a kit lens. I saved up a few months to get it, and it was also my first big investment. Then, I started taking photos of my friends. Most of them happened to be musicians, then it kind of clicked and I moved forward from there. How I view people and things have always been much different from others. I’ve always wanted to experiment with ideas, meet interesting people. But, I can’t draw. I don’t know how to paint and didn’t go to a proper art school like the rich kids.
Photography was the fastest and most accessible way I could use to translate my ideas into art. This happens to be the medium that I got involved with in my life, and it’s been a hell of a journey. Most of all I love the process of a photo shoot. The people I meet, the things everyone comes up with by working together. I used to tell people “I feel most alive when I’m on set, the rest of the time I’m just inside my head”. Because photoshoots are where my ideas get the main playground. Where my ideas get to go out there to see the world, and that’s what I’m living for.
I seldom experience that simple, laid back life that most people see when they travel to Vietnam. It’s all portrayed in my work — high contrast lighting, hectic, imperfect, but full of stories.
Babes of Saigon (I’m still not very sure about the name), it’s still an ongoing project I’m trying to push. I’ve always wanted to document this “phenomenon”, a theme I want to explore further and keep taking pictures of. So, in my mind, it’s still an ongoing project and I want to share the process with others.
In Vietnamese culture, women don’t have to cover their faces or hair. Yet, they are always so concerned with how they look to a culture standard. Many of them would go to ridiculous lengths, no matter how silly they look, to keep their beauty ideas. For instance, cover all their skin from the sun to keep the porcelain white skin. You look at someone covered from head to toe with 10 different types of floral fabric, plus giant sunglasses. It is hard to even tell if it was a person underneath all that or not. But once they stop the bike, and they take all that hideous “aprons” out, there’s a beautiful girl underneath! It’s kind of like magic—the Vietnamese magic. Haha.
I am inspired by pretty much anything that’s different from the norm. Non-conforming while telling a story at the same time. By things that are provocative, surrealistic, but not superficial and empty. I love how you can distort and transform reality only with a little black box and some glasses. That’s what I love about photography.
Most of the time I’m inspired by movies and music, painterly photographs. I watch a lot of movies and always listening to music. My ultimate inspiration is the classic Blade Runner (1986). I also get inspired by David Lynch, Paolo Roversi, David Sims, Annie Leibovitz, Harley Weir, Julia Hetta and Nicolas Jaar. Female beauty especially draws a lot of my attention. There are so many different standards and stigma attached to it. That makes it an inexhaustible source for a lot of artists.
My current favourite photographer to draw inspiration from is Harley Weir. I’m fascinated by city lights at night, like around 1am to 4am it is a magical time. Everything seems so still, so dead—yet so vibrant and so alive. My main obstacle would be financing and finding a stable team to work within photoshoots. Because the like-minded people I work with come and go out of Vietnam all the time.
If you want the best team you gotta have the budget, but that’s not the case for personal projects like mine. I’m looking forward to collaborating with other photographers/artists alike. I want to do projects together, to develop Saigon’s art scene more and more.
My advice: focus on your work and what you want to do most. Don’t waste time comparing yourself with others in the same field. These images were shot for Word Vietnam magazine, the Fashion issue. We shot these right in front of the Word office, utilizing the classic Vietnamese alley.
Photography to you means: A reflective process of observing, documenting, and creating the world around you.
When I frame the image: I position visual artefacts and anomalies crawling across TV screens in a rectangular box.
A camera is: A sometimes unnecessarily complicated device for drawing with light.
I watched the ghostly faces morph on the TV screen as I got electrocuted through the rabbit ears in my hand. The faces trespassed through me in one jolt. I had been moving the antenna back and forth and side to side like a kind of superstitious ritual. I took a picture of a distorted face on the screen just before I was shocked, an image my friend later described as a ‘horror-struck female pharaoh atomised in a digital matrix’. That was the last photo I took in the electrocution room. I was dazed for a while, counting my luck and pacing back and forth in a small Airbnb on Nguyễn Cư Trinh Street in Saigon.
I moved here in January from Perth, Western Australia. When I arrived I couldn’t help but gawk at the way that the streets’ electrical cables were wrapped around utility poles like seething masses of venomous vines. At night, a flickering red glow from a sea of motorbikes complimented the vines’ danger and allure. There was a similarly messy jumble of cords growing around the analogue TV where I was working. I thought maybe I’d created a bad omen. My girlfriend had warned me about it; the electricity in our room wasn’t grounded properly and we’d both been zapped a few times through our laptops. I only got electrocuted once before I moved out of the Airbnb.
I took about 50 pictures before it happened and then I narrowed them down to a smaller series named Ghost. As a photographer, I explore serendipity as a generative device and embrace the technical instability of broadcast technologies. I use TVs from various eras, different antennas, a digital camera, and a good dose of superstition and a chance to make my pictures.
I see this process as a kind of ‘photographic archaeology’ whereby I’m trying to unearth something psychological within a fractured and distorted video landscape. I don’t always know what I’m trying to achieve, so for me, the process informs the result and it comes down to experimentation and inquiry.
I took a picture of a distorted face on the screen just before I was shocked, an image my friend later described as a ‘horror-struck female pharaoh atomised in a digital matrix’.
To create Ghost, I transformed video footage from free-to-air Vietnamese television channels into a photographic sequence. I tuned into public TV stations and manipulated and distorted the video broadcast by moving around an antenna in one hand as I took pictures with the other. I deliberately introduced a lot of video transmission errors and took pictures up close to different parts of the footage as it was morphing and undergoing a process of disintegration in real time.
In a way, I am ‘scrambling’ video and then working from that to create new pictures. When I’m up close to the screen, faces will appear ghostly and distorted through the camera and are completely unrecognisable from the originally intended broadcast.
Each TV has its own idiosyncrasies: modern, high-definition technology combined with digital stations will produce a strong ‘macroblocking’ effect, which is a kind of transmission error where there’s a discontinuity between the blocks of pixels in decoded video frames. The video breaks apart into bars and squares and everything becomes rearranged and distorted. Severe broadcast transmission errors on modern TVs will also feature strong pixilation, and the transitions between each error will be very unpredictable and sudden.
When a video signal is interfered with or interrupted on older analogue TVs, the visual anomalies will be different, more soft and ghostly. The video breaks up and disintegrates in a different way as well. For example, everything appears ‘grainy’ or film-like due to the inherent lack of definition.
When I shot Ghost, etched lines and scratches would appear in the photographs and comet-like artefacts trailed across the footage, unlike experiments I did with newer TVs.
For a while now I’ve found video codec errors visually interesting. So with Ghost, there are a lot of signal interference anomalies, aliasing and tracking errors, and other visual artefacts that manifest unpredictably during my creative process. There’s a lot of randomness, disintegration, and transmutation in these works. I can never go back and take the picture again as it’s an organic process where I’m actually photographing the video footage on the TV as it’s mutating.
I see value in running scripts and altering the code in post-production to create glitch art but I prefer this organic approach because of how physical, ephemeral and unrepeatable it is. Quite often technical errors in video and photography are dismissed as undesirable, whereas I try to embrace technical errors and visual anomalies as a way to create new things.
I can’t say I ‘fell in love’ with photography, I just fell into it. Growing up in rural Western Australia, my mum had an interest in photography and there were always cameras lying around the house. This was a time before everyone had a camera in their pocket, so to me it seemed cool and interesting. It’s a common situation I think – a lot of the time you become interested in what your parents are into and you make use of what you have access to.
Photography was a way for my mum to document our family holidays along the southern coast of WA, and to take pictures of my sisters and me as we were growing up. Cool bikes, toothy toddler grins, and beloved pet cats frozen in time on tacky checkered lino floors.
As a young boy, my first camera was probably one of those Kodak single-use film cameras that you could buy from supermarkets. Those cameras had charm in that they were an irresistibly bright yellow colour and they came in a similarly garish box; they almost leapt off the shelf and were strategically placed near checkouts to encourage impulse buying. They were kind of like the camera equivalent of a Kinder Surprise or a Chomp bar. I liked how faux-mechanical they were, with their shitty plastic cogs and whirring sounds.
Once I got hooked I started to care more about my pictures and considered saving my pocket money for a more reliable camera. I knew my pictures weren’t that great even though no one told me outright. But I kept taking them. More often than not, the pictures went to the ‘could be better’ shame pile. I still feel the same way now. I’m never really happy with my photos.
In high school, my English teacher gave me a book of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, and I remember thinking it was an astonishing cross-section of everything incredible and awful about humanity. These images left a deep impression on me so my interest in photography developed further. There is mystery, humour, triumph, love, suffering, irony, beauty, terror, chance, error, and banality in pictures.
A picture can make you cry or laugh or groan or sigh or gasp or say nothing. Or it can make you reflect upon your life or scare you or annoy you or confuse you or bore the shit out of you or make you wish you were exempt from humanity. You can take a picture of something from countless angles and dance around a street scene like a crazed firewalker or stroll down a train carriage with a selfie stick as you crane your neck out like a flamingo. Or you can take a picture of your feet at the end of your bed and hashtag the shit out of it before you eat breakfast.
Photography can be anything you want it to be. I find it interesting to try to make sense of the world through a viewfinder, deciding what’s important to show and what isn’t. And how that changes over time. And how you view the world differently as you get older and presumably wiser. I’ve had an on and off relationship with photography for the last five years. I went through clichéd bouts of frustration and inspiration, and put my camera down for a short while.
A photographer once told me that photography is supposed to be a miserable lonely endeavour, and will eventually kill you. In 2016, I studied photography at university and went on what I can only describe as a photojournalism ‘boot camp’ in China, which was really challenging and inspiring and gave me some new insights as well as some amazing stories and memories.
I can’t say it killed me but there were some hairy moments walking around late in Shanghai, such as getting chased by an angry and unwilling photographic subject. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the experimental and bizarre side of art photography. I’m inspired by the creativity of the Surrealists and Dadaists, and by contemporary photographers like Asger Carlsen and Roger Ballen, who are exploring the fringes of their psyches and pushing the medium to its limits by toying with photographic conventions, and by doing strange and wonderful things with photography, sculpture and drawing.
I enjoy the absurdity and transgression of their photographic worlds. It’s often tongue-in-cheek, like you’re looking at a picture and thinking, ‘what the fuck is going on’ and you can’t help but laugh.
But it’s never one-dimensional because you’re looking at all the layers in an image for a long time, and it bounces around in your mind for weeks. While it’s a far stretch from the documentary photography that initially inspired me, experimental contemporary photography has encouraged me to explore my own ideas and creative processes and to value the medium more greatly as a way of expressing abstract and artistic ideas.
At the moment I’m working towards a solo exhibition and I have a few photography projects in the works. I’m also open to collaborations with other artists, so feel free to get in touch via my website.
Photography to you means: A process which allows one to extract elements from consensus reality and transform those elements in a variety of ways.
When I frame the image: When I frame an image I concentrate on what to remove from the frame and then how to arrange what remains.
A camera is: An image extracting device.
I was studying painting when, in 1967, I was drafted into Uncle Sam’s army and sent to Vietnam. Cameras were cheap at the PX in Nha Trang so I picked up a 35mm Petri 7 rangefinder camera. It wasn’t long before I was taking it everywhere and pointing it at everything.
When I returned to the US, I decided to switch my major from painting to photography. Initially, I studied photojournalism influenced by the work of W. Eugene Smith but moved to medium and large format black and white landscape work influenced first by Edward Weston and later by Paul Caponigro.
Eventually, I was exhibiting, had a dealer and was teaching advanced black and white printing and technical photography at the art school of the State University of New York, Purchase campus.
The title Echo Beach comes from the 1979 song of the same name by Martha and the Muffins with the chorus “far away in time” which seemed appropriate for this series.
In 1994 I decided to take a short sabbatical in Vietnam which turned out to be not so short as I am still here. The 2017 Echo Beach series was created in Vung Tau, Vietnam. It is the result of many experiments with the light, space, colours and object placement at Back Beach and how the photographic process could transform these picture elements. The prints are 70cmx46cm on bamboo fibre fine art paper, which works well to complete the watercolour feeling I wanted. (Many thanks to Danny Bach, master printer at VG labs in Saigon).
The title Echo Beach comes from the 1979 song of the same name by Martha and the Muffins with the chorus “far away in time” which seemed appropriate for this series. This quote from Ralph Gibson nicely connects with my view of photography: “I believe photographs are better than the photographer and the art is better than the artist. I’m not the music; I’m the radio through which the music plays. So I follow the work, I don’t lead the work. I go where the work sends me.”
My advice to artists is not to listen to any advice and just “follow the work.”
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