Students Photograph Vietnam

by Kari Wethington
2/23/01
Landscapes of the world, regardless of geographic proximity, seem familiar to Americans. To a nation raised on National Geographic and war documentaries, history seems forever wed to location. Spending Winter Term in Vietnam, seniors Pauline Shapiro and Brie Abbe investigated this theme through photography. The stirring results are displayed in Fisher Hall’s Expecting America: Photographs of Viet Nam.
Following professor of photography Pipo Nguyen-Duy to his native country, Shapiro and Abbe arrived in Vietnam full of typical predictions about the Vietnamese experience. In the best sense of the word, most of those expectations were “crushed,” according to Abbe. The January trip to Vietnam was the first return home for Nguyen-Duy since 1975, when he left Vietnam for the United States.
Shapiro and Abbe each display seven large color photographs, though the project was a collaborative process. Abbe explained that for her series of self-portraits, Shapiro controlled the camera. Abbe’s portraits are each a variation on a common theme: the irony of an outsider’s quest to find the “real” Vietnam. 
In the first photograph, Abbe wears a green dress that displays large dollar sign patches across the front. The dress is modeled after the traditional Vietnamese ao dai, a dress that is still worn. She stands on a crowded city street, waiting to board a bus. This picture, like the others, explore space, history and politics.
Shapiro’s half of the exhibit questions the relationship between the American historical perception of Vietnam and the reality of being there, seeing the ‘historic’ sites and perusing old battlegrounds. Shapiro and Abbe agreed that the experience of visiting the historic sites was surreal, but why it was surreal was a mystery. Was it high school history lessons coming back to haunt the photographers? Or, was it just inherently surreal? 
This theme is manifest in the photographs. One print shows the nighttime cityscape of modern Hanoi during Tet, its New Year’s celebration. Fireworks bloom in the dark sky as the silhouette of a parachute soldier looms over the scene, a stark contrast to the celebratory skies behind it. Each photo in the series juxtaposes a constructed war scene (with miniature props) with the current Vietnamese landscape.
Shapiro and Abbe have produced a magnificent collection of work that, besides its complex themes and questions, display a wide range of technical and compositional skill.