What Quietly Remains

Dao Duy Duong was born in Hanoi in the 1990s, which is when Đổi Mới stopped being reforms on paper and started arriving as concrete. The city he grew up in was demolishing and building at the same time: towers crowding the old lanes, motorbikes displacing bicycles, signage bolted onto French facades.

Even with the noise, I could still feel the old Hanoi quietly underneath.

— Dao Duy Duong

That is what he photographs. Not the noise, and not a preserved version of the city either. The part that has simply not left yet.

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Dao Duy Duong in Hanoi

Issue 03 was a foreigner making a long argument for paying attention to Hội An. This is the harder version of that job: photographing the city that raised you, while most of what you grew up around goes.

He writes as well, which is rarer among photographers than it should be. His site carries a run of essays under the heading Ways of Seeing — How I See Street, Quiet Noticing, How Color Feels — on colour, composition, and how to look at a street at all. They read like field notes from someone who treats noticing as a discipline with a method rather than a knack.

Which is worth knowing before you look at the pictures, because it accounts for their pace. A man who has written three essays about looking is not going to photograph a city in a hurry.

His work has run on Pexels and on Vietnam Streets. Portfolio and writing are both at duongdao.com, where the edit is tight and the sequencing deliberate. He is at @daoduyduong.