Vietnam
Robert Fournier
May 19 to June 29, 1995
| Not long ago, for many people, the word "Vietnam" conjured up images of a country torn apart by wartime atrocities. Those images were carried by news reports and TV screens, and they stuck in the minds of everyone who had been involved to one degree or another in those events. Yet beyond the pictures of a disfigured land, there is another Vietnam. The country of the Vietnamese, a land of extraordinary beauty and immensegeographical and cultural diversity that has taken two thousand years to build. |
| Images of an idyllic country with its palm-studded, deserted beaches, its coral reefs with their enchanted bays, garded by rocky spires, where junks and sampans quietly float. A landscape of rough mountains and deep valleys, of tropical forest still in their natural state, of plains dotted with emerald-green rice paddies. A rural tradition represented by peasants with their cone-shaped straw hats, by a boy riding a water buffalo at sundown. Peaceful images that contrast with the uproar of the cities, their noisy thoroughfares full of motorbikes careening down the pavement like human waves. These are the images of today's Vietnam. |
In the spring of 1992, after seventeen years of hostility, Vietnam opened her doors to foreigners. I wanted to discover this country before the tourists arrived. A few months later, I set out with a Vietnamese friend, in search of this new horizon. RobertFournier |
| Robert Fournier was born in Montreal in 1946. He has devoted the past
28 years to professional photography. He his known mainly for his landscape images, but his more recent work, done in Asia since 1989, has taken a different tack. He has begun to incorporate the human element, and his photography has taken on a documentary aspect. Some photographers define his work as subjective documentary. Fournier sees in reality a subject for interpretation rather than a subject for documentation. He feels that photographs cannot be understood separately from the photographer's subjective vision. Fournier has worked since 1992 in Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia and is planning a one year stay in China beginning this autumn ADDENDUM |
