One Hundred Assignments for the New York Times — Justin Mott in Hanoi
A Leica Witness who has spent two decades photographing Vietnam for the world's biggest publications — and who now spends his days teaching a new generation how to do the same.
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Welcome
Welcome to Issue 01 of Streets & Stories — the newsletter from Vietnam Streets. Each issue spotlights a photographer whose work in Vietnam deserves your attention. We start in Hanoi, a city with more photographers per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in Southeast Asia, and one that tends to keep the ones who arrive.
For a first issue, we wanted someone whose work could set the bar. Justin Mott has been photographing Vietnam for The New York Times for nearly two decades — more than a hundred assignments, alongside credits in National Geographic, TIME, Smithsonian, The Guardian, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a Leica Witness, a title Leica reserves for a small circle of photojournalists whose work the company considers exemplary. These are not small sentences. The work earns them.
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Photographer spotlight
Justin Mott in Hanoi
For the better part of two decades, if The New York Times needed a photograph made in Vietnam, there is a strong chance Justin Mott took it. His byline sits on more than a hundred assignments for the paper, covering everything from breaking news to long-form features to portraits of people most readers will never meet. The work has travelled onward into National Geographic, TIME, Smithsonian, The Guardian, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. Leica made him a Witness — a distinction the company gives to a small group of photojournalists whose work it wants to stand behind. Mott earned it the way all of those credits get earned: one assignment at a time, across years, in countries that do not always make the photographer's job easy.
He has been based in Hanoi throughout, which makes him something unusual in the international editorial world: a photographer whose professional address has never really moved, even as his work has. Most photojournalists with a masthead like his spend their careers chasing stories across continents. Mott let the stories come to him by choosing to live inside one of them. The resulting archive is not a greatest-hits highlight reel from Southeast Asia; it is a deep, patient record of a single country told in thousands of frames by someone who stays long enough to notice what changed.
These days, a growing share of his attention goes to teaching. Through AskMOTT, Mott runs an online school built around the thing most photography courses never get to: what it is actually like to live inside the profession. The platform offers a membership community, 1:1 coaching, a YouTube channel, and workshops. The pitch is not "learn this lens" or "copy this lighting setup." It is closer to a series of honest conversations with someone who has already made all the mistakes — including the expensive ones — and would prefer you skip a few of them. That the teacher has spent twenty years inside the editorial and commercial world, not outside it looking in, is what makes the platform worth the tuition.
His editorial archive lives at justinmott.com, and his teaching at askmott.com. Follow him at @askmott.
What we're watching
Links worth your time
- AskMOTT — Justin's online photography school — Membership community, 1:1 coaching, YouTube tutorials, and workshops from a photographer who has done the job at the highest level for twenty years.
- Hanoi — Vietnam Streets city guide — Our editorial guide to shooting in Hanoi: the Old Quarter, temples, markets, and the light that gives this city its character.
- Get featured in Streets & Stories — Apply to be our next photographer spotlight. We review every submission.
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