A Slower Way of Seeing — Adrien Jean in Saigon

This issue is about the parts of a city that don't announce themselves. Not the new bridge or the opened subway line, but the pool hall down an alley, the café where the same men sit each morning, the market that reads, from a floor above, as a field of worn umbrellas. Saigon is changing fast, and Adrien Jean spends his time with the things that are changing quietest of all.

Adrien has lived in Ho Chi Minh City since 2014, and his long-term project is an attempt to hold onto the city's ordinary texture at a moment when so much of it feels suddenly temporary. He photographs gestures and light and the spontaneous rhythm of the sidewalk — a monk on his alms round passing a game of billiards, five old friends nursing iced coffee beneath a Tết closing notice. He also runs photography tours and workshops built less around technique than around a slower, more attentive way of looking.

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Adrien Jean in Ho Chi Minh City

Adrien Jean arrived in Ho Chi Minh City in 2014 and stayed long enough to stop seeing it as a visitor. The photographs come out of that patience. He is drawn to the unscripted — the moment before anyone has arranged themselves for a camera — and to the ordinary spaces where the city's character actually lives.

You can see that instinct in the backstreet pool hall: a low room lit by one fluorescent tube and a hanging billiard lamp, shirtless men in the heat leaning on their cues, and, walking through the foreground in saffron robes and a face mask, a monk carrying his alms bowl and prayer beads. Nothing is staged. Two worlds simply share the same wet-tiled floor for a second, and Adrien is there for it.

These ordinary moments are, to me, what truly define the city and its soul.

— Adrien Jean

The café portrait is quieter and just as exact. Five older men sit on red plastic chairs against a peeling louvred wall, glasses of iced tea sweating on a steel table, a printed Tết 2026 notice taped above their heads. The man in the center meets the lens directly, one bare foot up on his chair, a phone loose in his hand. It is the kind of small, permanent-feeling scene his project argues is not permanent at all.

Then he changes altitude entirely. Shooting down onto an open-air market, he turns it into pure geometry — a patchwork canopy of faded parasols in grey, tan, maroon and terracotta — and lets one vendor in a conical hat anchor the frame, standing alone in a sliver of sunlight between the umbrellas. It is a picture about a place he clearly loves and a way of trading he suspects is being reorganized out of existence.

This is the through-line of his post-pandemic Saigon project: not the landmarks, but the small cafés, the improvised sidewalk businesses, the markets and vendors and the emotional texture of the streets. That work reached a public wall in April 2026, when the French Consulate hung Lyon – Ho Chi Minh City — fourteen large-format photographs of his, paired with images of Lyon by the French-Vietnamese photographer Tony Noël — along the exterior wall of the French Residence at 6 Lê Duẩn, where anyone passing could stop and look. Opened to mark the 53rd anniversary of France–Vietnam relations, it set the two twinned river cities against each other through exactly the kind of ordinary moment Adrien is drawn to. When he isn’t leading Saigon Photography Tours through Cho Lon, he’s adding to the ongoing project on Instagram at @adrienjeanphoto.

Links worth your time

• “Lyon – Ho Chi Minh City” at the French Residence — VietnamPlus — Coverage of the April 2026 exhibition pairing Adrien’s Saigon with Tony Noël’s Lyon along the wall at 6 Lê Duẩn.
• Saigon Photography Tours — Adrien Jean’s site — Adrien’s tours and workshops, built around a slower, more attentive way of seeing the city.
• @adrienjeanphoto — Adrien Jean’s Instagram — An ongoing record of everyday Saigon: cafés, markets, monks, and sidewalk life.
• Shoot with Adrien in Saigon — See the city through his lens: Adrien runs small-group street-photography day tours and workshops in Saigon and Hoi An.
• Saigon — Vietnam Streets city guide — Planning to shoot Ho Chi Minh City yourself? Our Saigon guide points you past the postcard.
• Get featured in Streets & Stories — Photographing Vietnam’s streets? Apply to be featured in a future issue.