Other Streets: Scenes from a Life in Vietnam not Lived (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798636555155)

In 1972, I was born Đỗ Văn H ng in Saigon, Vietnam. In the closing days of the war, as part of Operation Babylift, I was evacuated on a Pan American Airways 747, adopted in western New York, and renamed Mark F. Erickson. Growing up, I knew and thought nothing of Vietnam and only passively learned about it from the stories America was telling itself about the war, mainly through the movies of the 1980s. As a student at Harvard College, I made my first Vietnamese-American friends, studied Vietnamese history from a Vietnamese perspective with Hue-Tam Ho Tai, and learned documentary photography with Chris Killip and David Goldblatt. From Killip and Goldblatt, I learned how powerful photo essays challenged the national narratives of the English (In Flagrante), the South Africans (In Boksburg), and the Americans (Robert Frank's The Americans). Thus, in 1993, I returned to Vietnam with my manual 35mm film camera to subvert the version of my birth country that I myself had absorbed as an American. Through these images of ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places, I had a glimpse into a life I never had the opportunity to live. And twenty-five years later, it is also a glimpse into a Vietnam-now transformed by rapid economic growth-that no longer exists.

Author: Hung Van Do, Mark F. Erickson
ISBN-10: 8636555159
ISBN-13: 9798636555155
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 04/12/2020
Pages: 106
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 11.02h x 8.50w x 0.28d