In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives.
This book explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves.
Photography has played a central role in the telling of the Vietnam War story, but the perspectives of Vietnamese people have been consistently missing from these accounts. In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory.
Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese during and after the Vietnam War, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives.
Although visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves and provides a historical, political and theoretical analysis. The work will be of interest to scholars on modern/contemporary art history, as well as those working on Vietnam and its diaspora.
In this timely, compelling book, Thy Phu provides an incisive analysis of photographs and their status as historical evidence. His examination of Vietnamese war photography reveals that history does not provide simple answers about wartime photography, memory, or national experience. Warring Visions is a valuable reminder that the visual culture of war transcends legality and questions of truth.
Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam brings together an extraordinary array of photographs, from a mix of local Vietnamese photographers and people from the Vietnamese diaspora. It powerfully challenges dominant narratives of image making around conflict and memory.
Warring Visions considers everyday Vietnamese photographs, including images taken by professional and amateur photographers in North and South Vietnam during the height of the war, as well as those made of Vietnamese refugees overseas during the 1970s and 1980s.
