Photodart’s Weblog

One of the issues of documenting people in other countries is the way we ‘capture’ other people for ourselves like ‘trophies’. Photography critic Susan Sontag writes ‘Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends and neighbors’. She believes its ‘A way of certifying experience’ and continues by arguing that ‘travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs’. (Sontag, 1977).

This is a film of people who live on Phuc Tan Street in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is a very simple short film put to music showing a memory of my time living there. Is it a trophy? Did I travel there to satisfy a need to accumulate photographs or did I simply document my time there? Does it even matter? A short blurb about the footage or images provides a context as to why the film has been made and what is being said about subjects ‘captured’. This is my reflection:

‘Life in Hanoi happens on the street and this is very evident on Phuc Tan Street. It is a vibrant place on the Red River with an amazing sense of community and is where people from the countryside come and live to find work in the city. The work they predominantly do is street selling and are known as the traveling sellers. My friend Le Van Do, also from the countryside, lives in a boarding house on Phuc Tan Street. When I lived in Vietnam I often spent the evenings eating, drinking and playing pool ON the street with Do and his friends. With his help we created this little video which we later took back and showed to them’.