Travel Photographer of the Year: Vietnam

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Vietnam Is Next....

In under 10 days, I'll be once again back in South East Asia...this time in Hanoi, to lead another of my photo trips Vietnam: North Of The 16th Parallel Photo Expedition/Workshop™!

The itinerary will only include the northern half of Vietnam...so the title of the photo expedition is based (almost) on The Seventeenth Parallel, which was the provisional military demarcation line between North and South Vietnam established by the Geneva Accords of 1954. It will include Hanoi, Hoi An, Hue, Halong Bay and naturally Sapa and Bac Ha.

On this itinerary, the participants will be emulating real-life photo assignments, and produce multimedia bodies of work ready for publishing. The workshop is devised for photographers interested in documentary photography, ethno-photography and multimedia, and for those ready to create visual projects from their inventory of photographs, and learn how to control story length, intent, pace, use of music and ambient sound, narration, field recordings and interviews.

The participants are from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Australia...a veritable multinational group. I will be assisted by Maika Elan (Nguyen Thanh Hai), an award winning freelance photographer from Hanoi.

From a technical standpoint, I will be putting my two "rangefinders" (M9 and the Fuji X Pro-1) through their paces on this trip. Probably shooting in monochrome in the Sapa and Bac Ha, and color (with the Canon 5D Mark II) on the rest of the itinerary...with mostly wide angle lenses on all my cameras.

Everything is prepared and ready...the hotels, the visas, the internal flights...and even the local eateries seem to have been alerted of our arrival.

Christina Feldt: Travel Photography

"As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by other cultures, faces, customs and ways of living."

And this is in essence how Christina Feldt started her photographic career. She was not joking...she writes me that she's just back from a 9 months trip through Mongolia, Myanmar, SE Asia and Ethiopia; a trip that generated enough galleries to occupy its viewers for quite some time. She has also established a Photoshelter website which you can view here.

I've gone through most of them...starting with Ethiopia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Mongolia, Bangkok and Singapore, and when I got to Vietnam...I paused at Christina's lovely photographs made against the yellow walls of Hoi An.

That done, I read the compelling blog post she wrote about Mai, a 31-year old Hmong woman from Sapa, who told her that her dream was to see the ocean and to be able to read and write, so she could read the text messages on her cellphone.

It's no surprise that I stopped at her Vietnam gallery...after all, this is my forthcoming destination where I'm holding a 15-days photo-expedition/workshop, and her photographs serve to reinforce the 'visuality' of Vietnam and its people.

Vietnam: Photo Expedition & Workshop

I am pleased to announce the Vietnam: North Of The 16th Parallel Photo Expedition/Workshop™ during which we are planning to explore the street life of bustling Ha Noi, the colorful villages and ethnic minority tribes around Sapa and the Sunday market of Bac Ha, the daily life in the ancient port city of Hoi An, the beauty of the Forbidden City in Hue and the fishing village of Lang Co, as well as spending a night on Halong Bay.

All the details, including a link to register interest in joining, for this exciting photographic expedition and workshop are on this website.

I will be assisted on this photo expedition by Maika Elan, a talented Vietnamese photographer and photojournalist.

I normally don't feature details of my photo expeditions on this blog until they are fully subscribed, but as I am flying to India today and returning home at the end of March, I thought it would be more practical to put it out there now.

I've already received a number of outright registrations and indications of interest, as a result of my newsletter.

Richard Van Lê: Cao Dai

I've recently found this updated short movie on Cao Dai by Richard Van Lê, which fits my current mindset, as I am thinking of a photo expedition-workshop to Vietnam in the near future.

Cao Dai (Cao Đài) is a syncretistic, monotheistic religion, officially established in the city of Tay Ninh, in southern Vietnam, in 1926. Its first disciples claimed to have received direct communications from God, who gave them explicit instructions for establishing a new religion. It's a blend of elements from Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Animism.

Its saints' list is rather an eclectic one; with Buddha, Confucius, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur, and Jesus.

More background on Cao Dai can be found here.

Richard Van Lêis a New York City-based photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia designer. He is the founder of 138 Media LLC.

Mark Carey: Viet Nam In Black & White

"My photographic heart lies in documentary, showing things as they really are, not as someone has contrived them to be..."

Here's a photographer who shares my own photographic credo.

Mark Carey is a London-based documentary photographer, and who tells us he never had an interest in photographing posed or set-up shots, whether for his wedding photography or during his travels. I suggest you view his wedding portfolio, and see this documentary/photojournalism style applied to the weddings he covered.

His travel portfolio consists of three main galleries; Rajasthan, Varanasi and Viet Nam, which I think has extremely well composed black & white (one or two are in color) street photographs. I don't know if Mark shoots from the hip, but the subjects in many of the photographs appear to be oblivious of his presence....street photography at its best.

It's been too long since my last visit to Viet Nam, and I am starting to lay out plans for a photo expedition/workshop at some point to take place in this wonderful country.

A highly recommended viewing stop for all those interested in Viet Nam and solid street photography! Great travel photography does not need to be in color!

Paolo Patrizi: Ha Noi

"a relic of the many lives of a magical city, steeped in beauty and seductive charm."

And that's part of Paolo Patrizi's statement opening his gallery of Ha Noi which is a mix of very attractive street and documentary photography. From the Ha Noi gallery, I especially liked the photograph above...the colors, and the blur of the nón lá hat; this can be nowhere else but Viet Nam.

I met Paolo Patrizi briefly at the Delhi Photo Festival, and subsequently in November during the Angkor Photo Festival in Siem Reap. He's a documentary photographer, currently living in Japan. He started his career in London working as an assistant to other photographers, and having done freelance assignments for British magazines and design groups, he started to develop individual projects of his own.

Paolo's work is featured in leading publications and is exhibited internationally. His photos have won several awards with the Association of Photographers of London, The John Kobal Portrait Award, The Lens Culture International Exposure Awards, The World Press Photo, The Sony World Photography Awards, The Anthropographia Award for Human Rights, The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. His photographs are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work appeared in the Observer Magazine, Stern, Panorama, Corriere della Sera, GQ, Courrier Japon, Geo, XL Semanal, Przekroj, K-magazine, Handelsblatt, European Photography, Kaze no Tabibito, Vanity Fair, Sunday Times Magazine.

Francisco de Souza: Travel Photography

The website of Francisco de Souza is populated with galleries of India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam...large images which grab viewers the way images should. None of this silly small photographs to "protect my work" from Francisco. He wants to show his images, and he does.

His biography tells us he was born and raised in Zimbabwe, where he started to photograph his Shona tribal neighbours since he was eleven. Subsequently displaced from his Zimbabwean home, he travelled to many developing countries in Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and South East Asia. It is there he started to actively work with and support Non Government Organisations in Indonesia, India and Zimbabwe.

Francisco's work has been shortlisted in the Digital Photographer of the Year competition in 2009, and he received a Diploma in Photography from The Photography Institute of New Zealand in 2010.

In his India gallery, Francisco features an elderly woman in a red sari, possibly a Gujarati or Rajasthani tribal judging from her tattoos, being helped unto the back of a truck...a perfect capture in time and motion.

Aaron Joel Santos: Ha Giang (Vietnam)

Aaron Joel Santos is a freelance travel and documentary photographer based in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is represented by Wonderful Machine in the United States and by Invision Images in Europe and Japan. His clients include The Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, The Daily Telegraph and The Boston Globe. He is available for assignments across Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Most of Aaron's galleries are of projects in South East Asia, and include documentary travel, as well as commercial work such as photographs of hotels and resorts. I particularly liked his Ha Giang black & white gallery. Ha Giang is a province is in the northernmost part of the country, and it shares a long border with China's Yunnan province. It has many cultural festivals due to the presence of more than 20 ethnic minority groups.

Aaron also uses PhotoShelter to host his image archives, and you can see his collection of images of Laos, from the World Heritage town of Luang Prabang to the waters of Vang Vien and the capital of Vientiane.

Paul Levrier: Mekong Delta

I've posted the work of Paul Levrier before on The Travel Photographer's blog, but he just alerted me that his website Visions of Indochina had been updated, and now included large sized images...and he was right. His portfolio is certainly large sized, making it easier and more enjoyable to appreciate.

Having said that, I especially liked his must-see new section On Assignments which features his work from Can Tho, the largest town in Vietnam's Delta, where his intent was to record life on the Mekong river and its famed floating markets. He used a wide angle on a number of his shots, and with the extra large size he chose for his images, they appear almost life-like.

Reading Paul's notes on his accompanying blog, he tells us that while tourists usually visit the Cai Rang market, the largest on the Mekong, he headed instead to Nga Bay, but found that the local authorities had closed and pushed the vendors further up river to a rural location called Cho Noi...which was difficult to get to, and was consequently free of foreign sightseers.

I traveled to Can Tho in 2003 (eons ago, it now seems) photographing for a NGO, and unfortunately had no time to photograph the floating markets. After seeing Paul's images, this is high on my to-do list.

Al Jazeera: Vietnam

If you think Al Jazeera is only an excellent source of international news, and the Arab satellite television channel that left all our cable networks in the dust during the momentous events in the Middle East, you'd be wrong because it also features photography essays such as the one by Nicole Percel's Vietnam: Between Tradition & Modernity.

In February 2011; Nicole Precel and Nick Ahlmark were in Chi Ca Commune, a cluster of villages in Xin Man district, part of Ha Giang province in northern Vietnam, the poorest province in the country, to make a movie for the final episode of Al Jazeera's Birthrights, a series examining maternal health around the world.

Al Jazeera also features social documentary work such as the accompanying video The Mountain Midwives of Vietnam.

Travel Photographer of the Year