Vietnamese photographer Mai Te Thong¡¦s decades-old images of Hoi An show how much ¡V and how little ¡V things have changed.
DURING THE WANING days of the French colonial era, Mai Te Thong’s father presented his 17-year-old son with a gift of a medium-format Agfa 6x9 camera. It was a dream come true for the young photographer, who recognized an immediate intersection between his passion for making pictures and a business opportunity.
“At that time, there were lots of French soldiers and officers in Hoi An,” says Thong, 75. “I thought, ‘Why not make picture postcards and sell them to all these foreign customers?’”
Beginning in the 1950s, Tong, equipped with a sharp though untrained eye, captured photographs of ordinary Vietnamese at work: rickshaw coolies at rest, fishermen casting fish nets, buyers and vendors outside the downtown market, a practitioner of traditional medicine, the Old Town submerged in the flood of 1964.
In 1958, when he was 24-years-old, Thong opened a small studio. He specialized in portrait work to earn a living, but went on taking pictures of his hometown, a place that would later earn a listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to UNESCO, Hoi An “is an outstanding material manifestation of the fusion of cultures over time in an international commercial port.”
Thong’s use of black-and-white film lent a dramatic effect to otherwise ordinary images of daily life and added a subtle dimension to the simplicity of his images. The black-and-white images are artfully conceived, exquisitely lit and crisply reproduced. In comparison with 35mm photography, the larger negatives evoke a world of surreal clarity. The stark contrast between the provincialism of the Vietnamese people in their conical hats and the crumbling colonial architecture that marked the end of French Indochina highlights the separation between the local populous and their colonial administrators.
Much of this pictorial record of Hoi An in the 1950s and 1960s hangs on the walls of the newly opened Heritage Bar (pictured bottom right) at the Life Heritage Resort Hoi An. In nearly two-dozen carefully composed images, Thong chronicles a time and a place between the anguish of French colonialism and the imminent nightmare of Vietnam’s war with the United States.
“As soon as we glimpsed Thong’s images, we knew we wanted them for the walls of our new Heritage Bar,” says Chris Duffy, general director of the Life Resorts. In that space, you’re embraced by another era, and by the vision of a photographer who rescued so much grace from the march of time.
