Vietnam Images
A World of Decent Dreams
photographs by Ellen Kaplowitz, text by Jeffrey Hantover, foreword by Bernard Kalb
Vietnam and its people come alive in this visual journey beyond headlines and preconceptions. From village huts to the neon bustle of Ho Chi Minh City, engaging and riveting images present a Vietnam where tradition still thrives in a changing social landscape, where the bonds of community and family, to ancestors and to the land, remain defining constants. We see Vietnam at work, in rice fields and on city streets, at play and in prayer, and at family and communal rituals of life and death.
Vietnamese poems, prose, and proverbs dating back eight centuries evocatively underscore the continuities amidst change, while Jeffrey Hantover’s lucid text offers social and cultural context to the lives so warmly portrayed. Vietnam Images does not pull back from the toil and struggle of daily Vietnamese life, yet surprises with its broad embrace of a people sustained by tradition and alive to the promises of the future.
Ellen Kaplowitz has exhibited photographs at the Field Museum, Newark Museum, and University Museum of Pennsylvania among others, and her work has appeared in numerous galleries and publications. She contributed to the American Museum of Natural History’s major exhibition Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit. Jeffrey Hantover’s work on Vietnamese art and culture has appeared in various publications in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. Bernard Kalb, veteran journalist, author and media critic, covered the war in Vietnam for CBS News and reported on foreign affairs for both the New York Times and NBC News.
160 pp, 8.25 x 11.25, Hard
140 color photos, bibliography
Travel / Vietnam / SE Asia
ISBN: 1-891640-49-6
$40.00