diaCRITICS is excited to find this work by Phạm Ngọc Lân featured at Invisible Photographer Asia, a blog on street photography and visual journalism in Asia. However Phạm’s Vietnamese Chronicle series, featuring Vietnamese immigrants resettled in Siem Reap, Cambodia, is far more intimate than most images found within the genres of street photography and journalism. Instead we find an evocative and poetic glimpse into life during the darkening hours of night. “In trying to make their emotions come alive visually,” Phạm explains, “I touched profoundly the melancholy and emptiness.”
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Vietnamese Chronicle
I threw myself into the searching adventure. I spent a lot of time with the Vietnamese immigrants, who live in Siem Reap and asked them to tell their stories about our native land. Observing how they live and listening to their stories, I realized it wasn’t as what my secondary school teacher told us – that they, the ones who left our country in the most difficult phases of history, were all disloyal and indifferent. In trying to make their emotions come alive visually, I touched profoundly the melancholy and emptiness.
These are seven of 17 pictures in this project which was inspired by the documentary film Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over of Nguyen Trinh Thi and completed under the guidance of Antoine D’Agata in Angkor Photo Workshop 7th, Siem Reap, Cambodia.
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Phạm Ngọc Lân was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, in July 1986. He studied urban design and urban planning from 2004 to 2009 at Hanoi Architecture University (HAU). Inspired by the paradox of all living things, Lan considers himself an urban life observer rather than a photographer or an urban designer. Using photography and film as two of the favorite tools to express his ideas, his work attaches special importance to the direct, poetic and especially the whimsical respects of human life.
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