Lâm Xuân Tùng
To rediscover layers of original identity, drifting in the hurried rhythm of the city.
Hanoi, with most of Hanoi taken out
Lâm Xuân Tùng photographs Hanoi by subtracting it. The frames run mostly to black — dense negative space with a figure somewhere inside, isolated, often in silhouette, caught at the edge of being visible at all.
Street photography is an attempt to momentarily disconnect from the flow of algorithms and social labels, in order to rediscover layers of original identity drifting within the hurried rhythm of urban life.
From their feature — Streets & Stories 008









Subtraction as a method
Lâm Xuân Tùng photographs in Hanoi, and titles his frames rather than captioning them — Ranh giới, Nhất thể — which tells you the work is closer to a series than a record.
The method is consistent enough to be a position: expose for the light, let everything else go to black, and wait for one person to walk into what is left. It is a way of photographing a very crowded city that refuses to show you the crowd.
The series, in full
These nine frames are drawn from a continuing body of work. His own site holds the series; Instagram is where new frames surface.
Vietnam Streets features Lâm Xuân Tùng as a community photographer. We are not an agent and take no commission — everything here links straight to them.