Vietnam 2019

These images are from my fifth trip to Vietnam in winter 2019. I first visited the country in 1995, and then built my first website, called Vietnam Journal. It was one of the last assignments that I shot on film. During my third trip in 2016, I taught documentary photography in Hanoi for two months on a Fulbright. My approach to making photographs has evolved over the years, depending on the country where I am working. There is a famous quote by Robert Capa, who was killed in Vietnam in 1954, "If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough." This mantra has guided me since the 1970’s, with my preferred wide-angle lens that forced me to move in close to my subjects.This time around, I noticed something different while editing the images below. I still mostly shot with a wide-angle lens but stood back 15-20 feet, in order to juggle more elements in the frame. This selection includes work from all areas of Vietnam including Hanoi, the central highlands, the south central coast and the Mekong Delta.