VietNamNet Bridge – Once again, the people who live near Hanoi’s oldest bridge – Long Bien became the center of a multinational art project.
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This collection of over 140 photographs and four films came to existence out of a notion that was really more of a non-idea. The purpose was to produce a number of bodies of work in the same place – the Long Bien neighborhood – which did not necessarily have any relationship with one another, except for where they were made.
The four photographers – Barnaby Churchill Steele, Boris Zuliani, Tran Xiu Thuy Khanh and Jamie Maxtone-Graham - and four filmmakers – Tran Thi Anh Phuong, Pham Thu Hang, Do Van Hoang and Tran Thanh Hien - were asked only to create works about thinsg that they responded to as individuals, and in the ways they wanted to.
There has been no effort to create a theme or to impose any meaning, the thought being that the confusion of ideas and perspectives might better reflect the place.
Sponsored by the British Council, The Long Bien Picture Show is based partly on a simple observation of the way people make use of a neighborhood. In Long Bien, like anywhere else, there are as many reasons for people’s lives and livelihoods as there are residents. And all the things that happen in big cities happen here – good things and less good. People are born in Long Bien and others die. Some will spend their whole lives in this area, some want to get there to live somehow, and others are in great need to leave it.
This is, in fact, what people do – they use where they live and work in very unique and specialized and personal ways without any sort of overarching idea of what the meaning of that is. The place simply is and the people are simply there. It is enough to try and show that. How these things are shown – in the same way people find themselves in this place - is the purview of each of the individuals making the record. So, in this place, there are streets with houses and businesses, there are markets, there are families, there are small alleys, there are cars, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles. There are men and there are women. There are children. There are old people and young people too. Here, in the morning the sun comes up and in the evening it gets dark.
Some, or all, of these things showed up in the images and films made over the course of the three months that this group of individuals worked in Long Bien. And then there was always the possibility that the completely unexpected showed up in the frame. This has always been the risk in photography and filmmaking.
The works will be presented at the Goethe Hanoi Institute, 56 Nguyen Thai Hoc Street on January 23.
Ho Huong Giang
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