Houses of Soul — Alexandre Garel in Saigon
A French photographer's decade-long record of Saigon's fading architecture and the quiet displacement of District 8.
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Welcome
Last issue, Justin Mott gave us a career measured in New York Times assignments — editorial ambition on a global stage, anchored in Hanoi. This week we head south, to a photographer who has spent the same decade on a single city, working without commissions, without deadlines, and without anyone asking him to.
Alexandre Garel is a French photographer based in Saigon. For more than ten years, he has been documenting the city's fading architecture and the communities it shelters — work that has taken him from the canal-side settlements of District 8 to the colonial houses of the Mekong Delta. His photographs of informal housing along Saigon's canals arrive at a particular moment: the neighborhoods he has been recording are being demolished now, their residents rehoused, their routines scattered. This issue is a window into that disappearance.
Photographer spotlight
Alexandre Garel in Saigon
Alexandre Garel came to Vietnam with the eye of an architect and stayed with the patience of an archivist. Over more than a decade in Saigon, his lens has gravitated toward what the city is trying to forget — peeling facades, canal-side settlements built on stilts and scrap metal, streets where the power lines outnumber the streetlights. His work has appeared in ELLE Vietnam, Vietnam News, Dot Magazine, Tuổi Trẻ Magazine, and Viet TV.
The images in this issue come from his most recent project: a 2025 record of informal housing in District 8, along the canals of Kênh Đôi and Kênh Tẻ. These are neighborhoods born in the aftermath of the Vietnam War — makeshift homes that became permanent, communities that formed around shared riverbanks and narrow alleys. The city has marked them for clearance. Residents will be rehoused at lower cost, but at the price of a quiet uprooting.
Garel's larger body of work — Houses of Soul – Mekong — extends the same eye southward, documenting colonial-era houses across the Mekong Delta. It is a project about memory held in architecture: what a building remembers after its occupants have gone. A publication is scheduled for late 2026.
All of Garel's projects are self-funded. There are no grants behind this work, no editorial commissions — just a photographer returning to the same streets, year after year, because the subject demands it. You can follow his ongoing work at @saigonsnaps.
What we're watching
Links worth your time
- @saigonsnaps on Instagram — Alexandre's ongoing documentation of Saigon's architecture, canals, and everyday life. Follow for updates on the Houses of Soul – Mekong book.
- Saigon — Vietnam Streets city guide — Our guide to photographing Saigon, including District 8 and the canal neighborhoods Alexandre documents.
- Get featured in Streets & Stories — We spotlight community photographers in every issue. Applications are free and open to all skill levels.
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