The Last Breath of District 8

District 8 is not on a walking tour. It is a run of canal-side neighbourhoods in the south of Ho Chi Minh City where housing went up informally over decades — corrugated metal, timber, whatever the river did not take back — much of it in the years after the war. The residents are being relocated now and the structures are coming down, part of the city's redevelopment of its waterfront. Alexandre Garel photographed it through 2025, in its last season.

He came to Vietnam more than a decade ago and did the thing most photographers say they will do and then don't: he stayed. Saigon ever since. What he points a camera at is reliably the part that is leaving — fading shophouses, colonial buildings losing ground to towers, the communities that grew into the gaps the city left behind.

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Alexandre Garel in Saigon

The city continues its transformation, seeking renewal, striving to cleanse riverbanks made fragile by the very lives that once sustained them.

— Alexandre Garel

Read that again for the word "cleanse". It is doing a great deal of work: the official language of improvement, handed back with the cost attached. The riverbanks were made fragile by the lives that sustained them, and the remedy is the removal of the lives.

None of this is crisis photography. The pictures do not raise their voice, and that is a decision rather than a limitation. An emergency is easy to photograph. A slow administrative ending is not.

He describes his method as a "sensitive exploration of territories in transition", which reads as curator's language until you notice he treats buildings the way a biographer treats a person — what passed through them, what they were for, what goes when they go. His ongoing series Houses of Soul — Mekong follows colonial-era houses in the Delta that once anchored whole communities and now stand empty or altered past recognition. It is due as a book in late 2026.

The detail that matters most: all of it is self-funded. No grant, no commission, no editorial assignment behind any of it. His work has run in ELLE Vietnam, Vietnam News, Dot Magazine, Tuổi Trẻ Magazine and Viet TV, but nobody sent him to District 8 at dusk. He is at @saigonsnaps.

Gallery

District 8 — The Full Series

Thirty-six photographs from Alexandre Garel's ongoing documentation of District 8's waterfront settlements, their demolition, and the lives that continue within them. Shot on CineStill 400D film and Fujifilm GFX medium format digital.