beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful portraits:

view the photo essay here:

http://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2010/05/jamie-maxtone-graham-when-evening-comes/#

From the photographer:

“The photographs in this body of work came to be out of a couple of different but complimentary impulses.  The first was a simple curiosity of what the Long Bien night market in Hanoi, Vietnam – where I have lived since 2007 – actually looked like at night.  I have often been past the market during the day when it is closed and very little, if anything, is ever happening.  It is, in fact, asleep.  I found it is an entirely different place after night falls.

The second, more personal, challenge for myself was to make photographs in a different mode – both technically and aesthetically – and to engage the subjects, the people who work and even live in the night market, in a manner that required collaboration and ultimately a trust.  I wanted to bring some of the aesthetic of the studio into the street and to do this at night in this venue – a rough wholesale fruit and vegetable market in a tough section of the city near the Red River – seemed both absurd and entirely logical.  I like that kind of friction.

On a separate note, there are a couple of other ideas at work here for me.  In the West, ‘Vietnam’ continually connotes a war long over and other socio-political issues which often seem to sublimate the very “everydayness” of the place.  With as little prejudice as I am capable of, in this series I wanted to just look and be looked back at by people with no more overt agenda than just that.  These people photographed and I developed some relationship both in the moment we made the image and in the weeks I regularly returned, always with their portrait as a gift.  I also had in mind to embrace some tone of a 19^th or early 20^th colonial portraitist (in Indochina they were typically French and I admire a lot of that work) and so I tried to adopt a somewhat neutral distance and attitude with the camera while looking for something that expressed the nuance of this time, these people, this place.”

view the images here

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