Photography in Vietnam
Written by Kate Maruyama, CET Japan and Vietnam Program Manager
Vietnam is a great place for a photographer. The developing nation is changing so quickly that you might barely recognize the city after only a decade away. Every time I visit Vietnam, they have just finished building a new, gorgeous skyscraper. There is an amazing coexistence of modern and traditional, communist and capitalist, and many other seemingly “opposite” characteristics that live side by side inVietnam. And of course there are regional differences too. The bustling economic center, Ho Chi Minh City, is strikingly different from peaceful Hanoi, the national capital with French colonial buildings and a practically immortalized Uncle Ho. Going to rural areas in the Mekong Delta and Central Region provides yet another scene—undeveloped jungle, farmers working rice fields, livestock walking around the village. What will capture your imagination and lens?
Photographer and Union College faculty member Martin Benjamin exhibits some of these themes in his Vietnam photographs here. This fall, in cooperation with CET, he and seventeen students from Hobart and William Smith and Union Colleges will try to capture Vietnam on film once again. The group starts in Ho Chi Minh City, journeys through the Central Region, and finishes the term in Hanoi. All the while, students take Vietnamese language, Vietnamese history and culture, internship, and photography classes. Professor Benjamin previously led the group to Vietnam in 2007 when students created these photographic projects. If you had to sum up your study abroad experience or country in six photographs, what would you include?
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