Issue 018 · Spotlight

Nine Months In

Jim Kerns
September 2026

A woman on a scooter and a delivery rider with an orange cargo box pass one another in a dark stone alley — Jim Kerns

Jim Kerns left San Francisco in 2025 for Vietnam. Nine months later the rule is simple: out every day, camera in hand.

Words by Jack Ross

Two riders pass each other in an alley barely wide enough for both, and neither of them looks up. Jim Kerns took it.

A fruit seller in a conical hat waits in profile behind her laden basket of dragon fruit, grapes and green plums as low sun rakes across her patterned jacket — Jim Kerns
Fruit seller in morning light

He spent most of his working life in the United States — documentary film, educational video production, a run as a yoga teacher, graphic design, a few rock bands he describes as extinct for good reason — and was based in San Francisco until 2025. He has been in Vietnam and the region for the past nine months.

A woman in a floral conical hat cycles a red bicycle past a weathered yellow wall and a shuttered maroon window in Hoi An — Jim Kerns
Cycling past the yellow wall

If Streets & Stories is new to you: one photographer, one issue. Thanks for reading.

Jim Kerns in Ho Chi Minh City

Kerns came to Vietnam from landscape work. Much of his photography was made in the Western U.S. and Canada, where the subject holds still and the photographer waits on weather. Cities do not work that way, and his answer has been frequency rather than planning.

My current focus is to be out daily and shoot.

— Jim Kerns

Light is doing most of the work. He shoots at the ends of the day, wide open and close in as readily as from a footbridge.

A woman in a green shirt bends over her embroidery frame in a dark workshop, a framed picture of a kitten on the wall above her — Jim Kerns
Hand embroidery by lamplight
A woman wheels a bicycle loaded with bulging orange bags and a faded red tote home through hard afternoon light — Jim Kerns
Going home with the shopping
Workers in harnesses and orange helmets climb a lattice of steel scaffolding against a blank white sky — Jim Kerns
Scaffold climbers

The ongoing project is street life and construction across Vietnam. The country is being rebuilt in public, at street level, in the same frame as the people going about their day. Construction is not a detour from the street work; it is the street.

A barber in a red cap shaves a reclining customer's scalp on a folding chair set up on the pavement — Jim Kerns
A shave on the sidewalk
A vendor sits among stacked baskets of garlic, shallots, tomatoes and greens at a morning market — Jim Kerns
Market morning

He was circling this pairing before he got here. In 2024 the Los Angeles Center of Photography gave one of his frames an honourable mention in Thresholds, a juried show that took street photography as its starting point and urban architecture as its subject; the juror was Crista Dix of the Griffin Museum of Photography. The year before, a frame called CrossWalked was in F-Stop Magazine's Street Photography 2023 group exhibition.

A woman in a pink áo dài sits at the roadside, her long hair lit from behind by the late afternoon sun — Jim Kerns
Áo dài in the afternoon

Before the photography there were films. He directed Destination: Rossport, a documentary on Shell Oil's pipeline dispute in northwest Ireland that played on PBS stations.

A man and a small girl walk beneath a white umbrella down a lane strung with red flags in low golden light — Jim Kerns
Shelter from the storm

He posts the daily results at @rawideaphotos. If you want to watch a body of work accumulate rather than see it finished, that is the place to follow it.

A man in a straw hat sits astride the timbers of a rusting pier, working a bolt as the sea breaks beneath him — Jim Kerns
Dock repair
A figure wheels a red crate of goods through a narrow shaft of light in an otherwise dark yard — Jim Kerns
Loading in the dark
Seen from above, silhouetted pedestrians carrying boxes, a paint bucket and a plastic bag cross a low-sun street strung with red flags and long tree shadows — Jim Kerns
Strangers in shadows
A man in rubber boots hoses down a motorbike, the backlit spray flaring beneath strings of small flags — Jim Kerns
Washing the motorbike
A woman in a floral conical hat and a matching yellow-green floral blouse rides a battered blue motorbike away down the middle of a quiet street, the traffic and shopfronts ahead of her falling out of focus — Jim Kerns
Riding home in flowers
Behind the lit glass of a bánh mì cart on Bùi Viện, one cook turns pork on the grill in a cloud of smoke while another fills a split baguette, a pile of rolls glowing on the shelf above — Jim Kerns
Bánh mì after dark
A woman in a pink plastic poncho and a gold conical hat pedals a bicycle across a junction in heavy night rain, headlights behind her catching every falling drop — Jim Kerns
Crossing in the rain

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