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Overview
Mitch Epstein's evocative pictures reveal a complex Vietnam that few Americans have ever seen.This is not a document about the war; nor is it the pastoral idyll other photographers have portrayed. Vietnam, through Epstein's eyes, is a sometimes disturbing and sometimes sublime palimpsest.
Vietnam: A Book of Changes interprets a culture and landscape largely cut off from the West for the last thirty years, and now open to a market economy and a new relationship to America. The photographs are suffused with the rawness of Vietnamese life lived on the economic and political edge. Under the layer of friendship lies the tension of politics; under beauty lies violence; under the stark faces of remote villagers is the entrepreneurial momentum drawing them to the city; and under the remnants of war is an artistic bohemia grappling with new freedoms and continued censorship.
Synopsis
A photographer's compelling and poetic odyssey through modern-day Vietnam.
Publishers Weekly
Epstein's remarkable photo-essay, based on six trips to Vietnam between 1992 and 1995, reveals a land that few tourists or armchair travelers will ever glimpse. These impromptu yet powerful pictures display his admiration for the Vietnamese people's energy, depth, resourcefulness and dignity in the face of repression and stark poverty. He portrays a claustrophobic society, largely shut off from the world for the last 30 years, now becoming increasingly capitalistic under a dictatorial communist regime while still recovering from the devastation of war. Photos of crumbling houses, an itinerant veteran beggar, imported urinals, graffiti, a roasted dog's head, belie the official image of a communist idyll. Epstein, a cinematographer and production designer for Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala, includes a bittersweet personal essay that begins only on page 152, following the color photographyan unusual format device that adds to the book's visceral impact. (Nov.)