VIETNAM by George Triantafyllakos

I dedicate this book to my wife Mata, for her immense companionship, endurance and stamina throughout the fifty days of travelling around Vietnam, but mostly for her passionate love, devotion and inspiration throughout the forty-five seamless years of our married life begun on 4 April 1972

The Paths Less-Travelled

The Paths Paths Less-Tra Less Travelled velled

okion first emailed me in November 2015. He was planning a trip to photograph Vietnam, he said, and needed our help with logistics and ideas for locations.

He wanted to explore ‘vistas of high photographic interest’, and meant to visit us at different times of year to document Vietnam’s seasons. Looking at his website, I could see he had an eye for wild, almost oppressively vast landscapes of raw nature. In his Iceland panoramas, the lava fields, the ocean, the sky stretch away, only to turn in on themselves, inverting our idea of nature as freedom. But his portfolio also included macro photography, images of nature’s miniature kingdoms, and even something close to documentary, the industrial architecture of Thessaloniki Port. For all the variety, a geometrical precision marked Fokion’s work, and he would use this to expand our sense of space and perspective. I wrote back to him with a proposal for his first trip: Sa Pa, Ha Giang, Cao Bang and Bai Tu Long Bay, Vietnam’s far northern frontier. Five months later, Fokion arrived at Noi Bai airport. Along with him came Mata, his wife, best friend, photo critic and constant travel companion. We’re a family company, combined from two families actually, and with Fokion and Mata we felt an unusual kinship from the start. Despite the distance travelled, the differences in background and generation, and the fact it was pouring rain when I’d assured Fokion the wet weather would

have passed by now, we chatted like friends on our first evening together at our cafe on Hang Vai Street. ‘Life is full of shocks,’ said Fokion at one point, ‘you never know who you’ll cross paths with and where.’ He and Mata had already fallen for Hanoi, its ramshackle streets and distressed colonial facades, the youth everywhere, bursting like buds on a ragged old tree. And, for that, we knew they’d fall further for the northern provinces, no matter the challenges of a 2,000-kilometre expedition in the Vietnamese back country. The rain stopped that night, and at daybreak they hit the road north, arriving in the Hoang Lien Son mountain range at noon. Fokion had introduced himself as a landscape photographer, and thought of his Vietnam project mainly along such lines. His pictures from Sa Pa and Y Ty, the Dong Van Rocky Plateau, Bai Tu Long Bay, and from the second trip, Mu Cang Chai and Lai Chau in the northwest, explore epic extremes in Vietnam’s hinterlands. Generations of invaders have tried to tame these mountains, at least long enough to hold Hanoi and the fertile land along the Red River Delta: the Mongols, the Chinese, France, Japan ... all with varying degrees of failure. Before the modern-day Vietnamese, only the hill tribes had kept a toehold on these wild slopes, for unknown centuries migrating between high land and low, moving freely across the region. This is why H`ô Chí Minh hid out and built his rebellion in rugged Cao Bang province, and why General Võ Nguyên Giáp knew he could destroy imperial France 9

even at heavily defended Dien Bien Phu: whoever mobilized the hill tribes in this wilderness would win. Today, national roads connect these remote outposts, but the H’mong, Dzao, Thai and other groups continue to live in the wooden stilt houses or bungalows of a century ago. Phone lines criss-cross the countryside, most families have at least a motorbike for transport, and yet the buffalo still reigns among farming technology. In Fokion’s images, we often sense the precariousness of human life at this threshold of nature. A farmer’s shack teeters at the edge of a flooded rice terrace, the water a shattered window onto endless sky. Luminous green paddies wash across another image; adrift amidst the colour, wooden stilt houses like boats in a storm. In a H’mong plantation, the pitiless Vietnamese sun blazes down, farmers minuscule under a flimsy net canopy. More often, though, his pictures give us nature in its purest state: the charred volcanic mountainsides of Ha Giang; a cataract in Hoang Su Phi, pounding eternally over rock face; an immense river cave in Ba Be, scooped out of limestone over untold millennia. As with Ansel Adams’ landscapes of the national parks of America, we marvel at our insignificance. Nature ruled before us; it still rules; long after we’re gone, it will outlast us. Over two trips in the north, in spring and autumn 2016, Fokion covered some 6,000 kilometres of road, track and trail. When the trail ended, he and his guide

Colm clambered over rocks and into forest, often finding themselves amidst a different kind of epic. Deep in the jungle, foliage sprouts wildly, leaves, fronds, vines and trees surging with abandon, ruled only by hunger for water and light. Fokion abandons the point of focus in these images, upending our fragile sense of human perspective. Lost in the forest, we smell the damp leaves, hear the whine of the cicadas, feel the vines tighten around our ankles. Months after I first saw these pictures, I encountered Nguyễn Gia Trí astonishing lacquer painting in Hanoi’s Museum of Fine Arts, across which dense vegetation also sprouts and stretches, as if about to spring from the picture. The two visions entangle each other across a century of art, history and technological change. For all its natural wonders and startling geographical diversity, Vietnam is a country of people, nearly 100 million of them. As perspective, consider that this is tenfold the population of Fokion’s homeland Greece, although Vietnam is only two times the size. Visitors gawp at the traffic in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the floods of motorbikes inundating the streets during waking hours, apparently heedless of any internationally accepted conventions of road rule. And the pavements overspilling with traders of all sorts: shoe-shiners, key-cutters, tea-vendors, as well as entire restaurants, the kitchen a couple of gas rings amid a collection of pots, the clientele seated all around at plastic tables and chairs, chosen not

just for their cheapness but also their portability when the local police drop by to enforce fanciful laws against public clutter. Fokion’s street photography from Hanoi captures this barely managed mayhem subtly, with less attention to the people themselves than their constant motion: the headlight traces of traffic around the Opera House and Long Bien Market; the blurred figures of Old Quarter pedestrians in an evening downpour. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City may dizzy us with human chaos, but the majority of Vietnamese live in the countryside, so it was natural that, once on the road, Fokion would turn his lens to the people. He’d arrived with only landscapes in mind, but almost from the outset of the first trip, he found himself capturing portraits of locals and their daily lives. To my eye, these are among the most impressive pictures from all of his work in Vietnam. Many photographers romanticize or exoticize the hill tribes, the colourful costumes and hand-crafted jewellery worn in pictures like garments in a fashion shoot, their eyes photoshopped to glitter with preternatural wisdom. It’s a digital take on the old cliche of the noble savage, orientalism edited in Lightroom. But Fokion’s portraits of country people, in natural light, catch a humanity rarely presented in photography of Vietnam. While the orientalists give us people as types (wise, wrinkly elders; flamboyantly outfitted tribal women; cute, irrepressible kids) in these pictures we have a simple sense of each person’s individuality, their unique life. The pictures take

us beyond surface, and into a relationship with the subjects, as close as you might get without meeting them, and in a way even closer. ‘You never know who you’ll cross paths with and where.’ The photographs in this collection show us a Vietnam known only to those following less travelled paths, on often gruelling journeys into the horizon. But even then, it takes a special eye to give us the view as if we’re standing right there. At the farmer’s shack, we smell sun sizzling off the paddy field after rain; on Ha Giang’s volcanic mountains we feel an icy wind on our faces gusting down the Ma Pi Leng gorge from China; in the plantation we hear the H’mong women’s voices shouting across to each other, ‘… oi!’ Even for those of us calling this place home, Fokion’s photography is an irresistible invitation to adventure.

The Paths Less-Travelled

LANDSCAPES

Journey The Paths to the North

Less-Travelled

mpty hills hung with willow and bamboo, A mountain pass lies between Thuan and Quang, Leaves gaze at the water, trees stoop to touch it, Sea embraces mountain, waves seek to climb the slope, A winding path squirms up the hill, rock faces bulge and fall, Brushing aside the clouds to reach the highest point, Should you turn you’d see the moon, close on your steps. Huỳnh Mẫn Đat, Mountain Journey ~ 1830 Nearly two hundred years later, Vietnam’s wilderness still overawes the traveller. Bai Tu Long Bay, a sinking limestone plateau of thousands of sea mountains, spreads out along the northeastern coast for over a hundred kilometres towards China. Tourist boats, as if fearful of losing their way among this labyrinth of saltwater and jungle-clad outcrops, putter around within the prettier, more manageable confines of tiny Ha Long Bay. As evoked by Fokion in these dramatic scenes, you’d best keep an eye on the weather in Bai Tu Long: even experienced sailors and fishermen have been lost here. Sky and sea merge, cloud interchanges with rock, and the squid boat blinks out of sight. Like viewing a seascape from Turner, we can smell the salt wind buffeting our faces. We travel northwest to the Dong Van Rocky Plateau, Vietnam’s least hospitable and most spectacular region. More limestone cliffs and mountains, but the highest some two thousand metres above Bai Tu Long. The H’mong and Dzao villages clinging to these precipices farm what little they can from the arid earth between the rocks. Their sparse corn plantations, roots sprouting from volcanic crevices, stand out as miracles of make-do agriculture. But these communities are dwarfed by the immense

mountain slopes and gorges around them. While human settlements here date back three thousand years, the plateau itself has formed over many epochs, beginning in the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs walked these ridges. Fokion’s images capture this sense of the landscape patiently waiting for us to pass by into oblivion, just like previous ‘masters of the earth’. Now heading south we encounter cloud forest, thick-tangled canopies of green, sheltering rich ecosystems of flora and fauna, as we might imagine the jungles from which our distant ancestors emerged. Waterfalls spring from rock, transforming into torrents of whitewater thundering through the forest; but otherwise a drowsy quiet reigns. Fokion plants his camera right in the heart of this jungle, abandoning us in a nature we often romanticize, but now, face-to-face, barely recognize. It both repels and attracts us, gives us just enough light to find a way, enough air to breathe amidst the foliage. But these are pictures, and the point is to look; in the best of them, the details – a sprawling banana frond lost in rainforest; vines deftly strangling an ancient tree; a remote river-way reflecting infinite sky – entice us to stare. In the foothills, the Montagnards finally make their mark on the landscape, erecting bamboo stilt houses on lonely ledges, or tying up their sampan on the shore of vast lakes. Most impressively, they hand-carve their vertiginous rice terraces at altitudes of up to a thousand metres, and in Mu Cang Chai, Hoang Su Phi and Sapa, sculpt paddies with a sense of artistry and form pushed to ingenuity by the unyielding terrain. Fokion travelled with us twice in these regions, first in late April and May, the rice planting period, or ‘season of pouring water’, and then at pre-harvest, when the terraces briefly turn from green to burnished gold, signaling their readiness to be cut and threshed.

Both seasons offer the landscape photographer something special. In early May, the first downpours of rainy season flood the terraces, which have been dug so as to trap water for rice cultivation. At the corner of each ledge, the farmers punch a sluice that allows the overflow to pour onto the next level. Wherever you walk in the villages and along the dyke paths at this time of year, that sound of ‘pouring water’ accompanies you. And the visual effect is intense, like arenas of sun-reflecting glass, or smashed mirror – an impression Fokion captures brilliantly in these images. At pre-harvest time, meanwhile, the atmosphere is softer, the terraces grown shaggy over summer, the monsoon making way for drier days. These pictures tell of natural abundance, but also document the labour that goes into creating, tending and harvesting these paddies: the tiny huts amidst that sea of golden green serve as shelters for the even more diminutive farmers perched on one terrace, now just beginning to reap their crop. The road winds us down through green rolling hills to the tea plantations of Yen Bai and Moc Chau. Fokion’s architectural eye for lines and curves finds space to play here, swooping high and low among these cloud-cooled valleys. Much more than further north, man’s handprints cover these landscapes, every inch of fertile earth made productive. In one image, we note the tea factory, long and squat on the horizon, all metal and concrete outbuildings. It’s a rare glimpse of modern, industrial life among these pictures; we know that we’re leaving the wilderness behind now, and its ‘empty hills hung with willow and bamboo’.

OCCHIELLO PORTRAITS

Country People: Looking Harder and Longer

‘T

he eyes are windows to the soul,’ says the

old cliche. But it’s the creases at the corners of the eyes that tell us if a smile is genuine, and the furrows in a brow that speak of worry or hardship, and the blemishes and burns on a person’s face that testify to a life working in the scorching sun. A smile, or any other expression they may wear at the ‘decisive moment’, tells us nothing in particular about a person, other than their willingness to please, or of a thought briefly crossing their mind. And the eyes themselves, incredible sensory organs though they are, able to distinguish millions of colours and shapes in a blink, tell us even less. If we want to get a sense of a person simply from a picture of their face, we must look harder and longer. And if we hope to understand something of their culture, their country, its history and present, we need the guidance of the portraitist. Fokion’s pictures of Vietnamese country people encourage us to look harder and longer. In natural light, without make-up, or dressing in anything special, snapped in situ, on the go, they capture a startling sincerity in their subjects. They are sunhat-sporting farm labourers; couples of different generations; a trapper with his bamboo cage; wizened elderly wearing much what they must have a century ago. But the details tell us so much more when we look: a farmer’s red sunhat bears flecks of rice stalk from an afternoon threshing; one couple’s bare feet are so callused they look hardier than leather boots; the trapper’s cage is empty, meaning a difficult day, or an early sale, or that he’s just heading out for the forest; the Dzao elder’s cap is in fact a beret, a rare remnant of French influence in northern Vietnam. Most striking of all are the portraits shot against a black background sheet, as in a film or photography stu-

dio. Isolated from their milieu, each person’s individuality clarifies their selfhood, as distinct from their social position, their familial role, their job. The trapper is not just a trapper, or an uncle, or a war veteran, or a Vietnamese, but a human being who could ultimately be anyone, from anywhere. The ancient H’mong couple stand side by side, as they have done for decades, the man looking sickly in pyjamas, his wife perhaps fresh from the kitchen – how many individuals on earth survive through such loyalty? Looking harder and longer, we wonder who these people really are, away from their social context. The cultural and social signifiers in their clothing – the patterned shawl; the women’s head scarves; the trapper’s army coat – paradoxically alienate them even further from what we know or at least guess lies behind the curtain. The image becomes a mirror: who are you, the viewer? Can you see yourself in any of these faces, in youth, in middle or old age? But what do these pictures, these portraits, say of Vietnam? Most Vietnamese live, as these people do, in the countryside. For all the urban migration and industrialisation of the past three decades, it is an agrarian society. Like the Russia of Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, in which the writer depicts the cornucopia of characters and stories in peasant life, as well as its hardships and blessings, Fokion’s rural Vietnam is a place where old traditions run strong, the generations live intertwined, and nature is something people fear and respect, and never claim to have mastered. The nation may be undergoing great change, and on the cusp of experiencing even more, but the ways of the country still hold a definite sway, even in the heart of its most modern metropolises. Understandably: only a decade and a half ago, Hanoi’s new business district in Mỹ Đình – now all glittering office

blocks, international coffee chains and soaring skyscrapers – was a collection of rice paddies. On the streets of Hanoi and Saigon, you’ll find locals still enjoying country pursuits like rooster-fighting, fishing in the lakes, and sitting down on the pavement together with homemade rice wine brewed according to time-tested country methods. So we can say that these rural faces, combined in this way, conjure something elemental and persistent in Vietnam. But we can also glimpse the nation’s future in the younger faces here. A check-shirted H’mong couple exchange secret glances that tell of a hidden, perhaps illicit pre-marital romance; the youthful lodge owner has combed some styling gel through his hair to sit for this portrait; the harvesters wear lighter modern fabrics to keep them cool in the field, one girl still sporting her Dzao tribal cap under a wide-brimmed sunhat. The future belongs to all of them, together. Gathered like this, the variety of stories and lives is what impresses in Fokion’s portraits of country people, and the dedication to naturalism. Keep looking harder and longer, and you’ll feel you’ve lived these lives yourself.

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LIVING QUARTERS

Me and You Together: Living Quarters

very Vietnamese home has an altar, a shrine decked with red incense, gifts of rice wine, cigarettes and sweets, and faded photographs of the ancestors to whom all this is devoted. In most working-class homes, the altar takes pride of place in the phòng khách, or living room, where guests are entertained. Visitors can thus drink green tea, chew sunflower seeds and even puff the communal thuốc lào, or bamboo water pipe, in the company of hosts both living and dead. The walls around the altar often also feature family wedding photos blown up to near life-size; giấy khen, framed ‘certificates of achievement’ awarded by the local council for good citizenship; and a portrait of Uncle H`ô Chí Minh. This part of the home therefore tells us everything we need to know about the hosts’ values: family, citizenship and patriotism, and the commonsense Vietnamese conformity that makes every such space the same. Except, as Fokion’s pictures show us, they are all different. In one house, the altar has a glass cabinet crammed with decorative items like a tea set and a statue of Buddha, packed away as if in storage until the Tết Lunar New Year holiday. Another is veiled by plastic beads strung from the rafters, a collection of golden lamps and candlesticks tantalizingly visible among the offerings. In mountainous Ha Giang, Red Dzao families plaster the walls with pages from an old newspaper (title, Nhân Dân, ‘The People’) both for colour and to stop drafts blowing in on winter evenings in front of the TV. In some homes, the set-up is understated, almost bourgeois; in others, the dedication to the spirit world makes it hard to distinguish between an altar room in a house and an actual temple – and, in one pair of photos, Fokion challenges us to do just that. The poorest homes, meanwhile, must make space for everything in a single room: a string hammock by the altar promises post-lunch naps within touching distance of the depart-

ed, a dusty floor fan cooling us through dreams of the afterlife. We pass other homes and peek in, each picture a snapshot from Chekhov or Nguyễn Huy Thiê.p. In the first courtyard, a man slump-sprawls on an ornate wooden throne, while his blind grandmother probes her way past with a cane. Sacks of animal feed and miscellaneous boxes lie scattered around as the man snores. We think of the repeated ditty in one of Thiê.p’s blackly comic tales of domestic Vietnamese squalor: Aha! Without a king Drunk from morning till night The days and months are nothing Me and you together And the random symmetry between the man’s prone form and the grandmother’s cane gives the image its odd warmth: ‘me and you together’. Another courtyard, meanwhile, has been converted into a small convenience shop selling cookies and soft drinks, and simple children’s toys. A bamboo cage hangs in the foreground, its occupant a type of forest bird prized for its sweet warbling (reminiscent of one I encountered in a restaurant in Dien Bien, whose captors had taught it to warble ‘cú,u tôi!’, ‘save me!’). Deep within the house we glimpse the matriarch, the shopkeeper, inspecting some papers under the approving gaze of no fewer than two Uncle H`ôs. Many homes have been converted into small business� es or workspaces, a change only permitted after the Đôi Mó,i economic liberalization of the early 1990s. Indeed this sudden embrace of (managed) free market capitalism unleashed the Vietnamese entrepreneurialism visitors now marvel at everywhere. Overnight, housewives donned a conical hat and took their recipes for bún cha� and chè out-

doors, giving Vietnam’s cities their famous ‘street food’; men put their motorbikes to work as two-wheeled taxis or xe ôm; traditional trades flourished again after years of stagnation, like the steam-fogged rice paper production in Tho Ha village pictured here. Capitalism’s tendency to standardization and monopolies, and its eye for shiny new objects, mean such reinventions may have a limited shelf-life, but the Vietnamese loyalty to their own ways runs strong. Still, such images will no doubt become rarer over time, as air-conditioned fast food chains, Grab (the regional Uber) and cheap Chinese deals work their dubious magic. Vietnam is a watery country, and many rural homes have an ao, or pond, full of fish and frogs out back. Hanoi, too, is a city of lakes intersected by two major rivers (indeed its name means ‘between rivers’), and when the streets flood in rainy season, people still often have a rod and net handy to catch any fish wriggling past their doorstep. Saigon is even wetter, lying at the edge of the vast Mekong Delta. Residents have lived on the waterways here since the ancient Khmer period, when it was known as Prey Nokor, or Forest City. While the ‘forest’ nowadays is mainly of steel and glass, and many of the canals and streams have been concreted over, you can still find urban neighbourhoods living close to the traditional way, bamboo swapped for corrugated iron. And like other working-class homes in Vietnam, as we see in these ‘behind the scenes’ images, many double-up as shops selling rice or fresh vegetables, or a parking spot for the owner’s main means of transport and trade – in this case, a weathered wooden tugboat. The pictures in this series of Living Quarters all hint at stories of Vietnamese daily life, which Fokion encourages us to narrate ourselves. Wandering past and through these homes and lives, familiar and unfamiliar, we remember our own places, and the people who share them: ‘me and you together.’

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A Conversation: Fokion Zissiadis Talks to Thodoris Koutsogianopoulos

Even to someone who does not know you it’s obvious that after travelling to Iceland, Vietnam seems like the biggest possible contradiction one could ever imagine in terms of climate, landscapes, culture, in fact everything. Is there a particular reason you chose this destination?

Vietnam came about somewhat unexpectedly, after a conversation I had with friends about my photographic work and travels, which initially focused more on adventure and less on photography. Subsequently, the scale tipped more towards photography until Greenland, which followed Vietnam, where the journey had a great deal of both. Anyway, back to my friends. Over the course of our discussion they said to me, 'Guess what, we know some Italian explorers that travel just like you, and they told us about the four things you need to experience before you leave this life.' 'What are they?' I ask them. 'The first one is the light of the Aegean.' 'As a Greek I enjoy it in abundance,' I immediately respond! 'The second one is the vast expanses of Patagonia.' 'I have crossed Patagonia from one end to the other, from high up in Argentina down to Chile,' I instantly add! 'The third one is the starlit sky of Africa.' The truth is I have gazed at it many times and it fascinates me every time! 'And the fourth?' I anxiously ask. 'The natural beauty of Vietnam!' I was stuck there and then. And that was how I really became hooked on the idea of this 254

destination. Whether there really was some truth in their words or not, this is an opportunity, I thought, to do something I have missed out on. In any case, of course, Vietnam carries a very deep historical stigma. My generation grew up with Vietnam. I remember, as a little boy, that the American War, which followed that of the French, the so-called first war of Indochina, began in 1955. I was born in ‘56 and grew up constantly hearing about it. I remember my grandfather, at a time when there was no television, waking up very early in the morning, preparing his Turkish coffee, as we used to call it, and me finding him with his transistor radio by his ear, almost submerged in the livingroom armchair, listening to updates about Hanoi and the military developments in the area. This is what I grew up with, making up places and stories that I kept intact in my mind. Maybe that’s why I always harboured a silent curiosity to see this country and get to know its people. At first it seemed to me like a rather distant idea because it was not properly developed as a destination. From a young age, I became involved in hospitality professionally and my travels were oriented around wellbeing and tourism, in the sense that we know and comprehend the idea. Vietnam has been and remains far behind more popular destinations in Southeast Asia such as Bali or Thailand. So I never got to visit it for business purposes. But once I heard that story

from my friends, I immediately set out on the journey mentally, and decided to take it! This is how my affair with Vietnam began. Being a landscape photographer in the first place, I also did some research and discovered that there are not many books about the nature in Vietnam. There are many historical books, a plethora of films have been made about the war, but I didn’t come across any books praising the natural beauty of Vietnam and its preciousness. This worked like an extra challenge for me and so the die was cast! Initially, I planned to visit three times. To see the north during the first visit, then visit the central part and finally go south and see Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City. But as it turns out, all of my planning was turned on its head. North Vietnam slowed me down a lot ... it is extremely inaccessible and proved to be very time consuming. Eventually I had to visit it twice, for a total of fifty days, and limited myself to mainly photographing the north. I covered it pretty well, and on my way back to the south, I spent some days in Saigon and the mystically legendary Mekong Delta that granted me with amazing images. What was the reason for this imbalance? Because the road network in northern Vietnam dates back to the 1950s. The roads there are very narrow, extremely

labyrinthine, tiring, dangerous and slow to drive along. I figured I’d be able to move at an average hourly speed of about seventy kilometres, but I was wrong – we were only able to cover half that. I eventually made peace with the fact and decided to let go, effortlessly devoting as much time as needed to each place and not as much as I wished by following a rigorous schedule. In the end I realized that I had to go to Vietnam two or three more times to cover both the central and southern parts in a way that they deserved. The centre is known for its terrible war conflicts as well as for its many caves. This is where they recently discovered the Son Doong Cave, one of the largest caves on the planet that is now a tourist attraction. In order to gauge its vastness, imagine that a jumbo jet can theoretically fly right into it! Crossing it takes a week and it is a legendary expedition, one that I didn’t have time to experience. The south is essentially the financial centre, and the most modern part of Vietnam. It is famous for the Mekong Delta, one of the largest deltas on the planet, with all that this entails. I sailed a section of it for a few days and came back with a lot of material, as a destination it could be a whole, separate chapter, maybe for a next book. During my two trips, which were particularly exhausting for both Mata, my wife and travelling companion, and for me, we faced primitive situations and tremendous surprises. I’ve done a lot of

things in nature, some maybe extreme, but honestly I’ve never stayed in such simplistic accommodation. To give you a sense of what I mean, we slept just like the locals on the floor in open spaces without doors or windows, with wide openings on each end accompanied by all the sounds and smells of the night. We were lodged in villages devoid of any hotel infrastructure, in completely primitive houses, dating fifty to one hundred years back in terms of conditions. This held a kind of magic that I experienced and that I want to believe that I was able to capture and was a great life lesson. Now, I don’t know if it was a lesson that needed to be learnt at this stage of my life or not, that’s a whole other story. However, it has been very intensely carved into my memory as an experience, because it brought me so close to the earth and to the people. This is how the portraiture began. Speaking of the Mekong Delta, I remember your excitement when you took me on a tour of the Sani wetlands and the surrounding area on the first leg of the Chalkidiki peninsula, in the north of Greece. You revealed your love for the natural neighbourhood from your childhood, and that is where I saw the way you approach nature and tell stories about it. The interesting fact about the Mekong Delta is that there are three zones, the north, the middle and the south, each different from one another regarding climate, morphology and landscape. What did you see there? Did you witness something dramatically different, from the north I mean, something impressive? In the Mekong Delta everything is about water navigation. The housing settlements have always been located by the rivers or canals. Outside of Saigon, while a number of slums still exist which I had the opportunity to photograph, there used to be so many more. They are now considered eyesores, tarnishing tourism in the area which many want to

see torn down. However for me it was an incredible landscape, a composition I had never set eyes on before. Imagine Venice but with the DNA of the Far East in terms of construction, because of the strong ebb and flow affecting the area. They are stilt houses, one next to another, made of tin sheets and makeshift materials. They are essentially slums that communicate with each other as they are organically located on the banks of the canals. There are floating markets while families live there at the same time, whatever this means regarding hygiene ... even today, without a sewage system and without drinking water, the problem is huge. The Mekong Delta is like a cult in which the traveller is initiated in a special way, as he or she sails on maze-like canals, in some places broad and others narrow, with palm trees and mangrove trees, with houses and settlements tucked away in perfectly flat vegetation. Meanwhile, in northern Vietnam the landscapes are mountainous, inaccessible, and wild, with houses and settlements completely scattered amongst yet another type of wild vegetation. The climate is so humid that if you leave a piece of steel outdoors for three years, it will turn green! The vegetation and how it spreads is simply amazing. So you see how small-scaled, scattered and well-hidden the countryside households are, and you realize in hindsight why the world’s two superpowers, the French and the Americans, lost the war. It is impossible to confront these people in this particular environment. They have a stand-alone home organization based on an original residential structure – people on the top floor, animals on the ground floor, a pond with ducks and fish, water buffalos and stray pigs, a watermill and a rice field ... They have the basics, the essentials and look for nothing more, even today. They’re extremely resilient and frugal people; they don’t change their minds easily. It is very difficult for foreigners to persuade them to alter their lifestyle. They have their own philosophy and

set of values, and they are not inclined to embrace 'progress' as Westerners do. You know, there are very few cars in Vietnam while there could be a lot more. The motorbike is the main means of transport, the sacred property of every family, together with the bicycle it is used for everything, there are millions of them. They do everything on their motorbikes regardless of volume, weight or weather. In your project about Iceland there are hints of an uninhabited country with not a soul in sight. It’s as if everyone hid while you were admiring the scenery! How did people in a country like Vietnam reveal themselves to your lens? In Iceland’s countryside, where there is no vegetation, you lose your sense of distance and size. The lack of scale creates a strong sense of isolation, regardless of the total absence of humans. On the contrary, in the Vietnamese countryside, the prima facie absence of the human element is created for other reasons like, as I said, the wild vegetation that seems to devour and almost obliterate everything that exists and lives inside it – that is why, in the war, the Americans sprayed vast areas with Agent Orange, in order to deforest and strip the slopes of the dense vegetation that provided the locals with the perfect camouflage. In Vietnam, I noticed how inextricably connected people are to nature. I would set out to photograph a landscape and gradually, all the details of a farmhouse, its people, and everything else associated with it would be revealed. As I would approach, I noted something chaotic in the way that such a home economy is organized and functions on a daily basis. The truth, however, is that there is an invisible order behind the apparent disorder that a Westerner easily attributes to it. What do I mean by that? With our farmhouses, you comprehend their spatial plan immediately, where the owners live, where the storage facilities or the stables are. The houses in

Vietnam, the way they are elevated from the ground, standing on thick logs, the regular stilt houses, with bamboo-coated exteriors and interiors, save the ground floor for varied uses: miscellaneous materials, equipment, crops, pets, children, dogs, all together. To our eyes, this scramble seems anything from impressive to extremely problematic, but the people who live there have their own hierarchy and order. Seeing this, I couldn’t stop photographing them. Merged with the surroundings, they were the foliage of the trees, the bushes, the bamboo itself. There was a silent voice inviting you to capture them, immortalise them in the lens. They are very attentive people, very hospitable, they are happy to see you. They welcome you into their home and of course offer you tea, which is more than a ritual, or rice whiskey, a whiskey-flavored rice distillate, or strong tobacco in bamboo pipes. Personally, I expected them to be more distant. In essence, they are communicative and welcoming people. I saw so many young people, due to the fact that an entire generation was wiped out. People, who today would be between fifty and seventy years old, simply don’t exist. They disappeared in the war, which apparently killed many millions whose deaths have not even been recorded in the official statistics we read. Those who survived acquired a kind of wisdom and have gone through a great deal, first with the wars against the French and then the Americans. Then they had problems with Cambodia for about a decade. These are a people that have suffered greatly and this is evident in the stoic way that they face life. This may also explain their reluctance to change, but I think it is more a result of the philosophy that they themselves ultimately have about life. They are happy to show you their photos; that they fought for Vietnam. Every house has a central area with a shrine where H`ô Chí Minh’s figure imposes himself next to the family photos. The motorbike also makes its way into the

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home, where it is parked next to their heirlooms, diplomas and certificates from school or university, and awards from the military. They don’t leave the motorbike outside. It’s an integral part of their lives, as I said before, and an almost sacred one at that. When I asked to photograph them they were very receptive to the suggestion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of their hospitality, I was photographing in the field where snails were being harvested – they grow them because of the abundance of water – and a man asks me to come with them to his home that was just a little further down, to enjoy some tea! I tell him that I don’t have enough time. 'No, please, you must come with me anyway,' he insists! So we went, sat down, and he brought his entire family, his mother, his father, to meet us. I could see that they have the need and desire to communicate with foreigners who visit their homeland, to showcase their culture, and to also leave a good impression on visitors. The portraits show that they happily posed, unlike people in other countries, such as Morocco, where the mentality is different. There you have to 'steal' portraits, because they feel uncomfortable standing in front of the lens to be photographed. I also went to the bamboo factories, where they turn bamboo sticks into chop sticks – a big industry – and even there I witnessed the same thing, the workers always had a smile on their face! In the meantime, you know, Vietnamese society is more matriarchal than patriarchal. It is the women who perform the hardest chores. If you look at their hands and feet, which are bare most of the time, they are more man-like than those of the men. Women are everything there, they are the leaders of the family, the pillar. Women are always visible in the tea plantations and in the rice paddies and fields. Men come second. The women are everywhere, they fought very hard alongside the men. Families showed me pictures of women, who would now be grandmothers had they lived, armed with guns on the steep hills, in the forefront, 256

extremely tough. And so while I originally intended to only photograph nature, I eventually succumbed to temptation and photographed people, together with the places in which they spend their daily lives. You are interested in the principle, the context, possibly the structured frame which makes sense, you being an architect. To what extent did you adhere to your principles? Is the chaos of Vietnam a challenge for a man who likes symmetry? If you have a clear outlook and ability to study the landscape, you discover other types of symmetries or, if you will, balances that are equally impressive, that challenge you to decode and frame them photographically. I accepted whatever I looked at, whether it was symmetrical or asymmetrical, neat or tidy. I had only travelled to the Far East in the past once, to Beijing in particular, so I was pretty much unacquainted with the way of life in the Asian countryside. Of course, I didn’t expect to find a Western-style, say German or American city or province structure. I didn’t really know what to expect as this was the first time that I got to see the Vietnamese jungle up close. Maybe that has a value in itself. My outlook was pure. I didn’t visit Vietnam after experiencing other countries in the Far East, as their continuation of sorts. The experience was unprecedented and so it stuck in my mind. Now, if I visit another destination in the wider region, I will obviously have Vietnam as a reference point, which has been uniquely carved in my mind, soul and lens! I’ve noticed an interesting contrast in you, which I find very logical. On the one hand, you search for destinations that haven’t been travelled much, obviously because this is something that you like. On the other hand, however, you also make sure you are well organized. Your adventure offers you fun, but for you it is also a project. Do you allow for random events along the way?

Very much so! Because in any case, it’s impossible to predetermine all the factors that will impact such an adventure. The weather, the distances and most of all, the fact that you can’t figure out how much time you will spend in each of the places you visit. Something may, for some reason, impress you, and invite you to photograph it. This is something that can’t be scheduled, it is something you cannot know beforehand. Along the way, you might stay somewhere for an hour, two hours, more, who knows ... You need to go, look for it, climb, descend, walk through it, shoot it. You may even need to wait for a different light, and end up staying somewhere nearby overnight, just to take pictures the next morning or during the sunset the following day. It is an adventure that cannot be organized through an agency. You provide yourself with the basics, a car, a patient guide and even a local, experienced person with photographic knowledge – they call them 'fixers' and they’re essential because they lead you to the right places at the right time. They also act as interpreters, given the fact that the locals rarely speak English. In any case it’s impossible to perfectly plan from the beginning and, in the end, I don’t think you even need to.

When viewed from above, the leaves rock back and forth just like a reptile’s scales, reflecting the light, while looking upwards, the leaves greedily swallow up the light, creating the conditions of a natural abaton, or sacred space. Then there are the bare landscapes, millions of acres of sculptured rice paddies that have resulted from thousands of years of manual labour, giving the impression of an earthy tattoo of cultivated rice, which act like mirrors reflecting the light of the west and east, creating quite a spectacle. And finally, there are landscapes you only see after being perched on the highest slopes, where humidity and high temperatures create a diffused blur in the atmosphere that forces the light to play with the curved figures of the mountain ranges in a succession of different levels – the first one darker, then, after quite a distance, the second is a bit fainter and the third has almost vanished, so all this creates a visual acceleration until it gets lost in the horizon.

With regards to the light in Vietnam, there must be differences between the three different parts of the country. How did this play out photographically? Was it in a way you wanted? Are you satisfied with the result?

I am much more interested in interpreting than depicting what I see through my photos. I photograph realistically, seeking to convey emotion and sentiment, without resorting to conceptual or, if you will, creative editing. You and I may both be standing in the same spot, understand that we are looking at the same landscape, as a subject, but your photographic material may turn out to be completely different from my own – it’s all about everyone’s own mental world, aesthetics and sensitivity. The more we observe nature, the more it opens up to us. If we listen to it with respect, then we are capable of making our own interpretations. I organize every trip on my own. I initially envision the travelogue of an

The light in Vietnam has a mysticism that is quite different from what I’ve encountered anywhere else. In every different place it depends on the atmosphere, humidity and temperature, but it also depends on the terrain and the reflectivity of the earth and the materials on which you photograph. I could divide Vietnamese landscapes into three categories. Initially there are those with the gigantic, dense vegetation that often exceeds 30 metres in height.

Do you look at presenting the light that already exists and is visible through your own eyes, or do you have the artistic temptation to modify it and interpret it differently?

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adventure during the preparatory phase and mentally run through it. Then I realise it and imprint it and finally go through it for the third time through my recollections, when I personally sit down to edit the material I have created. I preserve all the emotions of each and every photographic experience in my soul and in my memory. I remember everything that I experienced for each photo, the conditions, the humidity, the temperature, the smells, the sounds, the tones and the light. When the time comes for me to edit that particular photo, I recall that moment in a magical way, combining it with the image on my screen, and if I need to attribute it with a bit more light or some colour, I do so with respect to the landscape, and in order to grant it the feeling it originally graced me with when I was there, photographing it. What do you believe these back-to-back travels have offered you? Nothing is simply offered to you. Therefore I would say that through my effort, perseverance and patience, I have gained the self-knowledge and experiences that have changed me as a human. My travels, which some might call expeditions and others adventures, are not leisure trips in a touristic sense. They are solitary, they require discipline, and compel you to deal with the demons that we all have hidden inside us. That’s why I never travel with a group or as a member of a team of photographers, I only travel alone. I might be accompanied by my wife Mata as well as a guide, merely for the sake of convenience and safety. I realized that every place takes time and requires peace of mind so that it can be revealed to you. You cannot and should not force or rush your pace so that you realize your desired outcome, no matter how long you have prepared for the trip or how much has been spent on that trip. Therefore, your travels teach you patience, they ground you in a way, they teach you to have lower expectations. I used to start with much higher ones. Before each trip 258

I try to study the place and see photos taken by colleagues who have gone to the same spots, regardless of whether I admire their work or not. I watch YouTube videos uploaded by all kinds of visitors. I try to study the place aesthetically – the vegetation imprinted, how the light comes in, is there a water element, what is the ground like? I watch films that have been shot there to understand the culture and to see how a director captures the spirit of the place. I study the terrain on Google Earth in order to understand altitude differences, distances, orientations and features of the areas that have sparked my interest. Arriving at your destination you would expect to find something that closely resembles your research, but the reality is that this isn’t always the case. So I would say that as a rule, you never imagined many of the situations that materialize, and anything you took for granted, believing you have researched it thoroughly, rarely comes up. Such as? The weather, for example. It may start to rain and rain, to pour so much that you think to yourself, 'What am I doing here? I can’t even go out, let alone photograph anything'. Or it may be too cold, or too hot, or humid, or a dense fog might be covering everything. So conditions force you to be patient and inventive in order to make good use of, or to maybe even discover something you didn’t know existed. In any case, the conclusion that prevails is that there is always something you can take pictures of, everywhere. So, your friends that we started our conversation with, were they right? I want to be honest with myself. The nature of Vietnam is strikingly beautiful. However, if I were dropped off in Cambodia (as we reached the Cambodian borders) and I was told that 'this is Vietnam', I would have believed them. Cambodia has very beautiful nature as well. Probably what they – my friends – meant was that this

particular part of the Far East is of great photographic interest. You mean the wider area of old Indochina ... Exactly! I might come across a photo of Laos and, having visited almost all of northern Vietnam, I could believe that it is from Vietnam. The landscapes are very similar. After all, the borders between them were placed there in retrospect. So in part, yes, the country is very interesting, but I can’t say that the uniqueness of the landscape is an exclusive privilege of Vietnam. Of course, many praise the vastness of Patagonia, but the same is true of areas in Chile or the African savannah. In China, you also come across wonderful, lonely, very beautiful places, but for some reason the story of these four musts, which one must experience before leaving this life, is how it is – of course, I am still wondering about how the list itself was created! What kind of story did you want to narrate through this book about Vietnam? What is the angle of your narrative? I want to bring to the attention of my audience what I saw and what I experienced, solely through the honest perspective and aesthetic of a landscape photographer. It is magnificently beautiful, with its tea and rice plantations, with people virtually assimilated to the place, living and working so closely to and incorporated with nature. I had nothing planned or mentally combined with the war and the atrocities that took place there. This is very important. While sailing on the Mekong or on the rivers and lakes of northern Vietnam, I recalled memories and felt like I was an extra in a film like Apocalypse Now, Indochine, or Good Morning Vietnam. But I didn’t photograph through such a mindset and didn’t document the sad consequences of the war or the genetic side effects of Agent Orange that even to this day

stigmatize younger generations. I could have highlighted these themes through photography but my approach, as I said, was that of the photographer who wanted to praise the country’s nature which I had heard so much about. So you still call yourself a landscape photographer basically, whereas you are a portraitist only by default? Yes, although portraits interest me just as much. It all started with the Inuit in Greenland – speaking of a people being at one with nature! But again, you just couldn’t take pictures of them! I tried to do the same in Morocco, but it was very difficult because you need to have personal connections there in order to get access into their homes and take pictures of their families – whereas in Vietnam it’s effortless. So that was even more reason to diligently take pictures of the people. A landscape has its own soul and its own spirit, but at the same time, isn’t a portrait a form of animated landscape? It is up to the photographer to capture and highlight it. Portraits would gradually start to become the centre of my interest and now I shoot plenty – not in normal studio conditions but as if in a pop up street studio, using the fabric backdrops I carry with me. I never use a flash and rely solely on natural lighting, wherever I encounter my subjects, in their workplace, at home or on the street.

what fascinates me and is what I wish to interpret photographically. I like to think of the earth as a huge room, in the centre of which urban islets have been created with inhabitants who are rarely willing to discover what is really happening in the farthest, darkest corners of the room. While the opposite should be the case – because what takes place there is what is truly unknown to so many people – things precisely concerning the laws that define and address central issues concerning the ontology of the world. The selective sciolism imposed by urbanism amounts to an ad hoc lack of knowledge. This, I believe, is the starting point for many distortions, even regarding our perception about climate change. Through such a mindset, the extreme ends of the planet, the far flung, the unknown and the inaccessible will always be at the centre of my interest. Do you have an unrequited desire to visit or photograph any place that is possibly inaccessible or off-limits to visitors?

Iceland, Vietnam, Greenland, Morocco, possibly Africa and who knows what else will trigger your artistic curiosity next. They’re all different, showcasing a variety of exotic landscapes. How do you define the destination that you want to photograph as opposed to another destination that leaves you indifferent? Does the destination have to be far away, does it have to fulfill one of the dreams of your youth?

It is generally not good to have unrequited needs, but yes, there are certainly many such aspirations and desires, but I know that I do not have the time to fulfil them all, even if I were much younger than I am now. I want to visit Antarctica in the near future and photograph it like I did in Greenland. I had reached Ushuaia when I crossed Patagonia and could feel the power of its attraction even from such a distance. The way I work takes up so much of my time and obliges me to visit the same place two, three or even four times if needed, in order to complete my work. I don’t just remain on the surface. So I understand that, following these specifications, I will only be able to see just a few more destinations.

Nature is the main motivation that determines my choices as I explore new themes and destinations. It is

What is the colour that has moved you the most or the light that has fascinated you the most?

It would have to be high up, in Greenland. Whether we are talking about the northern lights during the winter or the midnight sun during the summer, the light and colours there take on otherworldly, almost divine qualities. South Africa: is it the country’s intensity or particular monochrome palette that appeals to you the most? South Africa has its own set of unique charms. It’s not so much the colours as the vibes that the earth brings out. South Africa has a seniority, it carries an element of prestige, something very subtle, a certain maturity. In Iceland, the sharp frozen lava can easily cut your thickest boots while in Africa, after millions of years, this rock has become dust that scatters into the air and needs a full minute to settle back on the ground. Vietnam is like a green Iceland, with vegetation that has sprouted on the sharp granite that has yet to grow old and tired. This is a landscape that you don’t come across in Africa. There, the stones are sculptured. The rocks on which the big cats rest and observe are sleek. The land on which the wild animals run in the savannahs is soft. Trees that offer shade and create silhouettes are rare and each one is amazing, almost unique. In Vietnam, on the other hand, the vegetation is out of control. It’s as if you have just stepped into a green paradise in a state of ecstasy. Nature will always surprise you, wherever you go. Does each homecoming, apart from the respite that is necessary to organize each next mission, make you sad and intolerant towards daily life, and the trivial? How do you manage everyday life? It’s a rough landing each time. You fall back into everyday life in an abrupt way. That was one of the reasons I stopped working, so that I could focus on what I really wanted to do. When you return, however, you feel a certain sadness,

perhaps because you are entering the urbanism I mentioned earlier, in a world that surrounds you every day which can’t even begin to fathom what you have just seen or experienced. If you start narrating your experiences, you become weird. You do not communicate and, at the same time, people around you will find it difficult to communicate with you. Upon returning, your soul speaks another language, one that is perhaps a bit obscure, that people are unable to understand. I see this even within my own family – they tell me 'You are somewhere else right now', because what I am anxious about is to see my work before all the emotions and images I carry in my mind fade away. I sit in my office for hours, isolated for days. For a while, everyday issues seem to have been completely taken off my priority list. Let’s be honest, while the power of an experience may alienate you, it will ultimately create a new bridge of communication with the world. The need for storytelling, and much more than that, the need to share what you saw and what happened, gradually leads to communication. In a way, you are altered as a human being, and so others may eventually find you more attractive or interesting in that way. At the same time, you gradually attain a new balance and rediscover the warmth of companionship. Looking back on your experience in Vietnam, how do you feel that this journey has improved you, completed you, or even redeemed you? Every destination leaves a trace that holds a special place in my memory and my soul, something that works in me in an additive way. Yes, it is redeeming and evolves into an addictive habit. Pretty soon you need to live a new, even stronger experience. Eventually it becomes a passion. This feeling of accomplishment combined with the physical aspect involved is liberating. You test your limits by wanting to hold on a little more, for a little longer, before the light changes,

before night falls. This entire mixture of feelings of physical and mental fatigue, the task of choosing the right frame, isolating the landscape, and properly photographing the places you see for the first time is, as I call it, the 'food for the soul' of the explorer, the adventure photographer. It is often worth going on a trip just for one single photo, and at the same time, one photo among a wide number of shots may finally prove to be 'the' photo, as we would say. What was the shot you enjoyed most in Vietnam? I remember walking for several hours in a forest with extremely thick vegetation. It was so hot and humid, I really felt that I had reached my absolute physical limits. We were headed towards a clearing in the jungle, to see a thousand-year-old tree. Along the way, opportunities, shots of incredibly complex interest came into view right where I didn’t expect them. Leaves of all sizes and shapes, along with clusters of wild fig and ivy roots, mingled in a completely frenzied climb. Amazing windows into nature, carrying something mystical that compels you to photograph them. Another day I woke up very early in the morning, at 4:30, so I could perch on the slopes of the rice paddies, with my tripod all set and ready to photograph the sunrise. It was still dark and we walked by a school where the students were casually practicing gymnastics in their uniforms. What impressed me was the time of day it was. Families bring their children to school very early because the adults have to be in the paddy fields by dawn. The boys wore a shirt and shorts, the girls with ribbons in their hair and collars, all in uniform, performing the exercises in a perfectly synchronized fashion as if they were in a well rehearsed show! It was an unforgettable image of discipline. A little further down the road, minutes before dawn, I hurriedly walked along the slippery walls of a rice field. With a width of one foot at the most, 259

they are made of clay and you have to be very careful while stepping on them because if you slip you’ll fall, either inside or the bottom side, into the water and rice. As if I were performing acrobatics, I was loaded with my cameras and my tripod, while simultaneously trying to find a somewhat larger plateau to step on and set up my equipment. The photo I took will stay with me forever, perhaps because in my mind it carries the whole experience that led up to it.

it, as perfectly compromised equals. They do not wish for anything more and this is the way they move through life. As a Greek and a European, this is something I cannot understand. I would like to be able to improve a lot of what I saw. I’m not commenting on it, I’m not criticizing it. I am simply accepting it.

How important is it that besides being a photographer who has travelled to Vietnam, you are a Greek photographer who went to Vietnam?

Of course it has changed me. As a person and as an architect I have always been observant, but I am also a critic by nature. I like perfection, I love beauty in the sense of balance and symmetry. My constant involvement with photography has taught me to look at every moment in a photographic manner, even when I’m not holding a camera. Photography, together with the adventures associated with it, has essentially liberated me, pushing me to consciously turn my back on the world of business in order to migrate, with whatever legacy I carried with me, to the more abstract world of Art. I feel that through my photographic Odyssey I record and leave something completely personal behind me, and that gives me great joy, something I didn’t have when I was a white collar professional. Yes, I did a lot of things that I knew would be appreciated as part of the collaborative effort within a company. I felt I participated, and to some degree identified with certain situations, but I was never really on my own. I am now doing something very personal and draw tremendous satisfaction from enjoying the privilege of self-creation without any hindrance. I think that when I leave life at some point, the books that I have published will forever act as a legacy for generations to come. This isn’t simply about satisfying my human vanity, but the thought of the possibility of your child’s child looking at the book and saying, 'Oh, yes, back in 2014 Vietnam was like that, because in 2064 Vietnam will be slightly different'. It also holds the unique privilege

Greece is also a small country that has been through a lot. As a Greek, I believe I have a greater understanding and tolerance towards the different political and social episodes that Vietnam has been through for so many decades. Maybe I even have a better sense of things and a broader perspective through which I was able to accept their politics, their social and historical evolution, even their living conditions. I didn’t go there to immortalise the country as an imperialist or as a colonialist. My intention was to photograph their landscapes while standing with them on an equal footing. This is a people I admire for their achievements, for their remarkable endurance and for everything they have been put through. I have respect for them. I couldn’t consider them to be my brothers or kin. On the contrary, they are completely different as human beings and as a psyche – they do however have an iron will, which often leads them to a certain perception regarding the order of things. In many respects they wear blinders that do not allow them to prosper, they are attached to traditions; they are frugal and ascetic. They impress me because they live simply and at the same time happily. They had no trace of resentment and malice towards a European visitor depicting their lifestyles and work. They were people who seemed to be enjoying 260

How much has your systematic, thorough involvement with photography changed you as a human being? If it has at all.

of depicting certain destinations that, for better or worse, change, either through human interference or because of the passing of time. So people’s relationship with nature is imprinted, and this for me has a timeless value, the same as the value of being creative. Creativity is the elixir of youth, and in this sense you always remain current. In which of the destinations you have photographed have you really felt free, released even from yourself, from what Fokion is like, in the way only you know yourself? This happened to me in Greenland, but first I need to talk about something that is very personal to me. My father loved nature very much. He didn’t play sports, he was a breadwinner, a child from a poor family, a square mind. Maybe he carried some guilt, because I was born without all of my fingers on one of my hands. In a very stubborn way, in spite of my mother’s objections, he always pushed me, even from a young age, in order to toughen my will and increase my confidence in myself, to climb rocks, trees, to take on tasks that were dangerous for any child. He would take me on hikes into the mountains when I was very young. Without even realising it, he instilled an incredible love and appreciation for nature in me, which was obviously carved into my subconscious along with a penchant for all things dangerous: I did things by myself that were not normal, not for children my age. I grew up in a house in Panorama, far from the centre of Thessaloniki. When it snowed we were cut off, together with the five other houses in the area, something that my father chose and was considered very advanced back them. So that is how I ended up living in a country house, comparable in some ways to the farmhouses I came across in Vietnam. I had my own farm and my own livestock as a kid, and my father urged me to sell my produce. So off I would set around my neighbourhood, selling eggs, rabbit and chicken meat, and milk and cheese from

our two goats. Apart from all this, I was obliged to water the vegetable garden, harvest the grapes, gather the almonds, and take care of the crops, the apricots and the olives. My father would stick a branch into the ground to see how deep the mud was and check how long I had watered the soil. I can still see it now, right in front of my eyes. Strange as it may seem, I would smoke lettuce leaves! I wrapped up the leaves and smoked them, and we would get high, at eight years of age, hiding in the vineyard ... I was a real Tom Sawyer and would catch snakes and lizards with my bare hands. On the other hand, of course, I was raised in a well-off family and went to college. But it struck me how my classmates were afraid to spend the evenings alone, even in their apartments in the city. To me it seemed perfectly normal to be outside on your own at night, listening to nature and inhaling its scents! The way I was brought up obviously nurtured in me a familiarity and love for nature. Probably, for this reason, when I renewed my interest in photography at some point, I decided that locations of photographic interest would be my main subject. This is how landscape photography came about. When I later went on to study architecture in the US, I bought my first camera so that I could capture the incredible New York City urban landscape, which was completely foreign and extremely striking to me. I remember going down to Brooklyn, crossing the bridge on foot and photographing the skyscrapers. It was something unprecedented – the magnitude, geometries, perspectives, and building materials. Back in Greece, with a family of my own and going into business, I abandoned photography for many years. Then my interest in it resurfaced, this time however it focused on nature. Although I have photographed several of the world’s capitals – Berlin, New York, Beijing, Paris, Moscow, and many more – urban landscapes do not particularly appeal to me. I have great photos of many famous monuments, buildings and streets, but that’s not what attracts me. 261

What is your relationship like with your parents today? My father is still alive but unfortunately, at the age of ninetyfour, he has lost touch with feeling, he forgets as he suffers from dementia. Many times, when I am in magical landscapes, in scales that minimize human existence, I see them with his eyes, and even if he doesn’t feel it, I bring him mentally close to me so that we can admire the amazing scenery together. When I was in Greenland in extreme polar cold conditions that compel the senses to go into survival mode, I was in tears, remembering my parents as an antidote to the ordeal I was going through, especially my father, who was very tough with me. In retrospect, he may have acted wisely. I have experienced so many moments in which I have witnessed incredible images, which can’t be described in words, which are simply imprinted in your mind, which quite possibly change you forever. Some believe that there is an inert harmony in nature. Others claim there is a lack of balance, a chaos that is eternally and miraculously self-defined. A third view claims it is man who, in many ways, influences and shapes nature. What is your opinion? Man is too small and insignificant to determine developments in the environment, at least in terms of the magnitude he believes or thinks he can. Of course, anthropogenic activity is constantly expanding and has serious repercussions, as it increases with geometrical progress, especially in urban areas, which are, after all, human structures. It is only when you visit the far ends of the planet, and experience up close and firsthand what exactly is happening there, where the landscape sizes and forces involved in their formation are incredible, with unreal scales and power, something that is especially hard for the mind of 262

a city dweller to grasp ... only then do you complete the puzzle, only then do you complete your idea of planet earth. Personally, I feel that there is an imposed balance, determined by a higher power. I would say it is a law that defines all developments, even to what extent man will evolve, which is so powerful that it cannot be threatened by anything or by anyone. So in a weird and magical way, nature does a hard restart on its own. At its most critical, nature makes its own corrections and interventions and returns to where it should be or where it ought to be found. As if some kind of superior power, if you wish to call it that, intervenes. You have to coexist with nature if you want to live harmoniously together. In the end, you are the one in danger, not her.

critic, I find myself maturing at the same time. Not all destinations are as easy, and so I believe it’s crucial to develop skills so that you can finally unlock and interpret the Genius Loci, the spirit of a place, and photograph it in a way you yourself believe it deserves. Finally, what is photography? Music without sound. Prose without a script. Above all, a feeling that shapes moods. It is a creative activity, communicating through a window with a private view onto our ever-changing world. It is the watchtower of endless reflection and a personal, artistic quest.

How would you describe your photographic outlook? Ever-changing. It constantly shifts, in the same way that we change biologically. I could say I started out with a more stylized, more structured language, mostly photographing architectural, urban landscapes and spaces. Photography is an observation. You see something that exists and that many people simply pass by. My gaze starts to become more experienced, more critical, starting from a more structured visualization, and evolving, developing into something more abstract and perhaps more artistic. Liberated, I start exploring dipoles, light and shadow, the beautiful and the ugly, the elements of dualism in general, where one cannot stand alone without the other. I now treat and highlight themes in a different, more symbolic way. So I feel like I’m evolving. This is the way I understand that my work is also entering a new phase. Friends and co-workers who actually follow my work remark on the same thing. Evolution, however, comes on its own and can only have a positive, sweet pace. It is, in any case, a transition from one situation to another. Being my own 263

First trip Second trip 13 1

Hanoi

Sa Pa

Y Ty

Bac Ha

Hoang Su Phi

Coc Ly

Chay River

Pan Hou Village

Ha Giang

Nam Dam

Meo Vac

Dong Van Karst Plateau Geopark

Ma Pi Leng Pass

Song Nho Que

Ba Be Lake

Ha Long Bay

Tho Ha Village

Mai Chau

Lac Village

Pu Luong Nature Reserve

Ban Cong

Nui Pha Luong

Ta Xua Nature Reserve

Moc Chau District

Phu Yen

Nghia Lo

Expedition Leader, Photographer Guide & Translator:

Tu Le

Colm Pierce

Khau Pha Pass

La Pan Tan

Mu Cang Chai District

Than Uyen

travelling together but also for his thorough

Hoang Lien Son

knowledge of the Vietnamese language

Fansipan

which mostly helped to establish an

O Quy Ho pass

Van Long Wetland Nature Reserve

Cuc Phuong National Park

To Alex Sheal for his inspirational and

Tam Coc Garden

detailed planning, for his critical back office

Hoa Lu District

support while on the go, and mostly for

Ho Chi Minh City

My Tho

Vinh Long

Sa Dec

travel map

Expedition Organisation & Execution: Alex Sheal & Nguyễn Thi. Hai Yê´n - Vietnam in Focus

To Colm Pierce for his unlimited patience in heeding all my photographic vices and needs through our fifty days of

effective communication with the people of Vietnam.

his wonderful, touching texts written with dedication, exclusively for this book.

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The Paths Less-Travelled

F okion first emailed me in in November November 2015. 2015. He was planning a trip to to photograph photograph Vi-etnam, Vi-etnam, he said, and needed our our help help with with logisitics logisitics and ideas for locations.

Artwork List

background and generation, and the fact it was pouring with rain when I’d assured Fokion the wet weather would have passed by now, we chatted like friends on our first evening together at our cafe on Hang Vai street. ‘Life is full of shocks,’ said Fokion at one point, ‘you never know who you’ll cross paths with and where.’ He and Mata had already fallen for Hanoi, its ramshackle streets and distressed colonial facades, the youth everywhere, bursting like buds on a ragged old tree. And, for that, we knew they’d fall further for the northern provinces, no matter the challenges of a 2,000 kilometre expedition in the Vietnamese back country. The rain stopped that night, and at daybreak they hit the road north, arriving in the Hoang Lien Son mountain range at noon. Fokion had introduced himself as a landscape photographer, and thought of his Vietnam project mainly along such lines. His pictures from Sa Pa and Y Ty, the Dong Van Rocky Plateau, Bai Tu Long Bay, and from the second trip, Mu Cang Chai and Lai Chau in the northwest, explore epic extremes in Vietnam’s hinterlands. Generations of invaders have tried to tame these mountains, at least long enough to hold Hanoi and the fertile land along the Red River Delta: the Mongols, the Chinese, France, Japan… all with varying degrees of failure. Before the modern day Vietnamese, only the hill tribes had kept a toehold on these wild slopes, for unknown centuries mi 77

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Art Direction Dario Tagliabue Book Design Giorgio Gardel Colour Consulting Group Consultancy Colour Consulting Group Photographs by Fokion Zissiadis Text by Alex Sheal Thodoris Koutsogianopoulos Translation from Greek Eleni Papaioannou Copyediting Emily Ligniti for Rizzoli Book Editor Maria Cecilia Curti Technical Coordination Sergio Daniotti Elena Rocco Sara Saettone Libri Illustrati Rizzoli ÂŠ 2019 Mondadori Electa S.p.A., Milan First Edition: September 2020 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publishers. Distributed in English throughout the World by Rizzoli International Publications Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10010, USA ISBN: 978-8-89-182842-2 2020 2021 2022 2023 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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ISO 9001 Mondadori Electa S.p.A. is certified for the Quality Management System by Bureau Veritas Italia S.p.A., in compliance with UNI EN ISO 9001. This book respects the environment The paper used was produced using wood from forests managed to strict environmental standards; the companies involved guarantee sustainable production certified environmentally. Printed in Italy