A City of Contrasts

This is the second issue from Hanoi. Issue 01 opened the newsletter there with Justin Mott, and the city is layered enough to take a second pass — particularly from someone who arrives at it from a different direction.

Xuan Phuong Le started more than a decade ago, as a hobby, with no decisive moment attached. No conversion, no trip that changed everything, just a slow shift in what she stopped for. She is independent, based in Hanoi, and works across street, documentary and travel photography, which in her hands are three angles on one question rather than three jobs.

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Xuan Phuong Le in Hanoi

Hanoi inspires me to slow down, observe, and capture fleeting moments before they disappear.

— Xuan Phuong Le

The useful thing to know about her is that she has lived in three regions of Vietnam: north, central and south. Most photographers of a city are rooted in it, which is an advantage and also a ceiling — after long enough you stop being able to see what is specific to the place. She has the comparison. She has worked in remote mountain villages where a day is a different length, and she works in Hanoi, where days do not so much pass as pile up.

Her subject is ordinary life and the rituals nobody performing them would call rituals. That punishes hurry, and the patience in the frames reads as method rather than luck.

She also runs photography walks and workshops in Hanoi, closer to translation than instruction, since she knows both the Vietnam locals see and the one visitors are trying to find. Worth saying plainly, though: the teaching is the sideline. The portfolio at xuanphuongle.com is the case for her and it stands up unaided — careful composition, natural light, and a refusal to push a scene into being something it is not. She is at @xuanphuong.clover.