One Hundred Assignments for the New York Times

If The New York Times needed a photograph made in Vietnam at any point in the last two decades, there is a fair chance Justin Mott took it. His byline sits on more than a hundred assignments for the paper — breaking news, long features, portraits — and the work has carried on into National Geographic, TIME, Smithsonian, The Guardian, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. Leica made him a Witness, a title it gives to a small group of photojournalists it wants to stand behind.

This is the first issue of Streets & Stories, the newsletter from Vietnam Streets. Each one puts a single photographer's work in Vietnam at the centre. The subscribe form is at the bottom.

Justin Mott in Hanoi

I've shot over 100 assignments for the New York Times.

— Justin Mott

He has been based in Hanoi the whole time, which is the genuinely unusual part. A career carrying those mastheads normally means chasing stories across continents; his professional address has not moved in twenty years while the work travelled without him.

So the archive is not a highlight reel of Southeast Asia. It is one country, photographed by somebody who stayed long enough to see what changed in it — a different kind of record, and a much slower one to build. Anybody can fly in for the event. Almost nobody is still there for the decade either side of it.

A growing share of his time now goes to teaching, through AskMOTT: a membership community, one-to-one coaching, a YouTube channel and workshops. What it covers is largely the part photography courses skip — not which lens, but what the job is actually like from the inside, including the expensive mistakes.

The editorial archive is at justinmott.com and the teaching at askmott.com. He is at @askmott.