Once again, the
people who live near Hanoi’s
oldest bridge – Long Bien became the center of a multinational art project.

The fruits
of this project are four experimental documentaries entitled “Long Bien Picture
Show” and a collection of over 140 pictures, which were made in three months.

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