Vietnam 40

Vietnam was a country I had always wanted to visit, ever since my late brother Harry Jr went there in 1996, where he had taken some of his most stunning and iconic photographs. But I knew that when I eventually came here that I would have to shut my mind away from his images and find my own Vietnam. And in March 2015 I arrived in Saigon and spent 3 months travelling the length and breath of the country. By chance my arrival happened to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam. Although the photographs you see in this book might not have been taken at all. On my third day in Saigon, a moto thief stole my camera while I was waiting to cross the street. I was standing at the edge of a busy intersection scrolling through some shots on the camera which I had just taken, when out of the corner of my eye I felt something coming toward me. In the blur of the moment I noticed something reaching out from the seemingly endless stream of scooters passing by. I could feel what was going to happen, but I was powerless to react in time. A hand grabbed the camera strap and in a millisecond my Canon 5D was gone, snatched out of my hands. I looked up to see the pillion passenger swinging the camera around above his head like a prize and racing off into the distance. I immediately gave chase and started running after him through the traffic. I didn't think about being hit or run over. Running in the middle of the road, surrounded by literally hundreds of mopeds and scooters everywhere, passing me by as I ran up the road after the thieves. I looked behind me to see an empty green taxi coming toward me. I stopped him and jumped in and said 'Follow that scooter.' Needless to say the taxi driver's English was about as good as my Vietnamese, so he didn't understand a word I said. With some frantic sign language he set about following the thieves but in a city of 12 million scooters, my camera was long gone. I was depressed and angry. I had lost my only camera and of course it wasn't insured. I wondered to myself if I should just leave Vietnam and forget about taking photographs. Maybe it was a portent of things to come? I had no camera so what else was I going to do. I wasn't there for a holiday; I was there solely to take photographs and nothing else. After a few days my mood settled. I wasn't injured and a camera is a replaceable thing, and perhaps it was meant to happen. Over the next few weeks while I waited for my brother to send me his camera as a replacement, I decided to make a panoramic pinhole camera out of a tin of biscuits, a packet of Menthos, black tape and some hardware nuts and bolts. It was one of the most satisfying things I have ever done and it was the first time I used film since I was a young boy. Most of the images in this book are shot with a Canon 5D Mk2, an old Russian Panoramic film camera and of course the new edition to my camera collection, the Saigon Cookie camera. As unpleasant as that experience was, I wasn't going to allow it to taint my view of Vietnam. I discovered a passionate country with beautiful people. A country who could forgive their oppressors and move on from it's painful past to embrace the future and the world around them. Vietnam is one of the most beautiful countries I have ever had the opportunity to visit, from the chaos of streets of Saigon to the majestic mountains of Sapa to the quaint streets of Hoi An. It is a country full of people with enormous hearts. Vietnam really is a rare gem in the crown of Asia. Looking back now, in the three months I spent there, Vietnam taught me one very important lesson in life and it is a lesson that is prevalent in the Vietnamese psyche and way of life – Don’t hold onto the past, forgive and move on. After all, life is too short.