“I’m glad I met him. He’s got a great eye, which means more than just being able to take a technically competent photograph. I checked out his photographs before seeing him in Hanoi, and was impressed by his Long Bien series. These are photographs of the people who live around the Long Bien bridge in Hanoi. These are not the kind of people, and this is not the kind of neighborhood, who appear in your Vietnam Airlines travel magazine. Most of the urban neighborhoods in big and small cities look like this one, and most of the people look like these people. That’s what I mean by having a good eye–looking beyond the usual way Viet Nam gets captured in photography, which is, for the most part, about war, tourism, and the anthropology of rural people, especially minorities.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author The Sympathizer
“I’m glad I met him. He’s got a great eye, which means more than just being able to take a technically competent photograph. I checked out his photographs before seeing him in Hanoi, and was impressed by his Long Bien series. These are photographs of the people who live around the Long Bien bridge in Hanoi. These are not the kind of people, and this is not the kind of neighborhood, who appear in your Vietnam Airlines travel magazine. Most of the urban neighborhoods in big and small cities look like this one, and most of the people look like these people. That’s what I mean by having a good eye–looking beyond the usual way Viet Nam gets captured in photography, which is, for the most part, about war, tourism, and the anthropology of rural people, especially minorities.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author The Sympathizer