Featured Photographer

Jim Kerns

Landscape taught him to wait. A city taught him to go out every day.

Street & documentary · Ho Chi Minh City · Street life and construction
His website His Instagram
Photo © Jim Kerns
The work

A country being rebuilt in public

Jim Kerns made most of his photographs in the Western U.S. and Canada, where the subject holds still and the photographer waits on weather. Vietnam does not work that way, and his answer has been frequency rather than planning — the ongoing project is street life and construction, which is a closer pair than it sounds when a country is being rebuilt at street level, in the same frame as the people going about their day.

FRAME 01 A woman on a scooter and a delivery rider with an orange cargo box pass one another in a dark stone alley — Jim Kerns
Two riders pass one another in an alley barely wide enough for both, and neither of them looks up. The only light in the frame lands on their faces.

Construction is not a detour from the street work; it is the street.

From his feature — Streets & Stories 018
02A 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
03A 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
04A 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
05A woman wheels a bicycle loaded with bulging orange bags and a faded red tote home through hard afternoon light — Jim Kerns
06Workers in harnesses and orange helmets climb a lattice of steel scaffolding against a blank white sky — Jim Kerns
07A barber in a red cap shaves a reclining customer's scalp on a folding chair set up on the pavement — Jim Kerns
08A vendor sits among stacked baskets of garlic, shallots, tomatoes and greens at a morning market — Jim Kerns
09A woman in a pink áo dài sits at the roadside, her long hair lit from behind by the late afternoon sun — Jim Kerns
10A man and a small girl walk beneath a white umbrella down a lane strung with red flags in low golden light — Jim Kerns
Portrait of photographer Jim Kerns
Jim Kerns Street & documentary · Ho Chi Minh City
Read his Streets & Stories feature →
Who he is

A long way round to the street

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

He was circling this subject before he arrived. 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 — judged by Crista Dix of the Griffin Museum of Photography, and a year before he moved to a country doing its rebuilding in the open.

His rule now is a simple one, and he states it plainly: be out daily and shoot. He shoots at the ends of the day, wide open and close in as readily as from a footbridge, and posts the results as they accumulate rather than waiting for a finished body of work.

His photographs have appeared in F-Stop Magazine’s Street Photography 2023 group exhibition and in the Los Angeles Center of Photography’s Thresholds 2024. He also directed the documentary Destination: Rossport, Ireland, which played on PBS stations.

See more of his work

The daily record, and the archive behind it

These nine frames are a small selection. Instagram is where the day's work turns up first; his own site holds the wider body of it, including the landscapes he photographed before Vietnam.

Instagram @rawideaphotos New frames, first. His website www.rawideaphotography.com The full body of work.

Vietnam Streets features Jim Kerns as a community photographer. We are not an agent and take no commission — everything here links straight to him.