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Rangefinder
Magazine Portraits, Landscapes and Visions of Vietnam by Lou Jacobs Jr.
When I began this story, Peter Steinhauer was living in Hanoi, though a few months later he moved to Singapore, so we have only “met” by email, telephone and through the lovely pictures in his book, “Vietnam: Portraits, Landscapes, and Visions,” published by Edition Stemmle, 2002. Included are 70 duotoned photographs plus an informative foreword, preface and introduction. Peter says he moved to Singapore, “To work in a larger commercial market, but still be close enough to Vietnam to go back about every 90 days on ad photography and personal business.” Peter was born in Colorado and studied photography at the Colorado Institute of Art. He later worked in San Francisco as an assistant, but in 1993 he moved to Hanoi and started what became the book project. Asked how he chose Vietnam, he explains, “The reasons are very deep and personal.
Vietnam has always been a part of me. My father was a doctor with the Third Marine Division in Danang during the war in 1966 to 1967, and I grew up listening to his stories about the country. Father also gave us slide shows, and in 1988, after Americans were welcomed into Vietnam as tourists, my father returned. This time he went north to Hanoi where he became involved with a humanitarian group that gives medical equipment and supplies to Vietnamese hospitals. As part of this work he traveled back to Vietnam several times a year, accompanied by my mother, and soon my older sister who became involved in the humanitarian work too. “ In Hanoi my parents met a family with whom they became very close, and in 1993 they invited the oldest daughter, Nhu Nhu, to come to Boulder, CO, our hometown. They offered to enroll her at the University of Colorado and support her while she attended. I had just finished photography school, and on my first visit to Vietnam, I lived with the girl’s family in Hanoi after she moved in with ours.”
Peter intended to stay in Vietnam for three months, during which time he planned to make a portfolio of portraits and landscapes to show to galleries back in the States. He had searched books and galleries for black-and-white images of Vietnam, and found only wartime pictures. “So I quickly formed my idea into a book project,” he says, “based on what I had already been visualizing the country looked like. But when I arrived in Hanoi, I was overwhelmed with the sounds, smells and sights of what was happening all around me. And I kept wondering how the Vietnamese really felt towards Americans.” Despite many Vietnamese friends his family had made, at first Peter was a stranger in the country and says he was scared. Those feelings disappeared quickly as he was treated warmly. “It was sensory overload at first, and it’s hard to describe my feelings about the culture in which I was immersed,” he recalls. “Fortunately, I had the opportunity to photograph anything I wanted, and the subjects were endless. Seeing how many people still suffered from terrible wartime experiences, I felt my book could be a small contribution to the ‘healing process.’ I hoped it would help Americans better understand the people and the country beyond the context of the war.”
For 10 days Peter wandered in Hanoi, observing and listening, photographing in his mind. He recalls, “I didn’t know much of the language but slowly picked it up, practicing with friends and in the markets.” In his book, the main photographs, after small black and whites woven through the opening text, begin with the portrait of an artist who had approached him at a theater. Communication was awkward, but Peter was invited to the man’s house for tea. Later that afternoon the artist, Phuc, sat for a portrait, and Peter’s project was underway. Soon Phuc began assisting Peter, translating as they visited homes and pagodas around Hanoi. “ One place that captivated me was Ha Long Bay,” Peter recalls, “and I sailed the tourist route around this beautiful bay. Of all places in Vietnam I still hold Ha Long closest to my heart, and I’ve returned there countless times to photograph its landscapes.” He soon understood more of the country’s history and discovered subtle nuances of people, places and the culture as he photographed.
Eventually Peter had another guide, a photographer named Nguyen Hoai Linh, a friend of his “new Vietnamese sister” living with his family in Colorado. As they photographed together, Linh directed him to more spots in Hanoi, took him to festivals and villages, and became his best friend. Peter says, “He introduced me to many Vietnamese traditions plus the very best places in Hanoi to have a beer. One of the most memorable occasions was the Dong Ky Firecracker Festival during Tet (New Year’s Day on the lunar calendar). The villagers lit nine-meter-long (29 feet) firecrackers—I call them bombs—and exploded them to scare bad spirits away. Without a doubt it was the most intense and exciting spectacle I have ever witnessed.”
Peter continued to be fascinated by Vietnam, and kept delaying his departure for seven months when he returned to Colorado, declaring, “I was eager to develop film, make prints, and get my fix on Mexican food I had been missing.” However, in less than two months, he was drawn back to Vietnam to live for good and continue to photograph a country that is, as Peter puts it, “untouched by modern culture.” He explains, “In my portrait work I chose artists, workers, farmers, villagers and herbalists, showing them in their working or living environments. I had to light all the interiors because many spaces did not have windows.” But he liked having full control over where lights were placed. He took pleasure in portrait environments full of texture and depth that invited his creativity, but he also began traveling more to shoot landscape pictures. “ Vietnam is a huge country,” he states, “and I realized that my project was on a very large scale, and might be years in the works. My friend Linh introduced me to two of his friends, and I took them on as assistants. We traveled widely, from the far north all the way down to the Mekong Delta, spending a few weeks at a time in areas where I photographed harbors, rice paddies and lovely land forms.” Pictures in Peter’s handsome book are all black and white. In notes about the pictures Peter says he chose some subjects and locations with an instinctive personal vision. Many landscapes are seen in soft light as Peter explains. “I was not prepared for the atmosphere in the sky. It wasn’t at all like rainy skies or heavy fog. It was a haze that I now know is part of Asia. I learned to embrace this weather and use it; it is part of life there.”
Many landscapes were photographed with a Wista cherry wood 4x5 field camera using an assortment of lenses, or a Horseman 6x12 SW panoramic camera. Portraits were shot with a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II. Peter shot 4x5 Kodak T-Max 100 in medium and 4x5 formats, and switched to 4x5 T-Max 400 for some locations. At his Hanoi office and darkroom he processed all film in a Jobo ATL 1000 processor. Kodak HC-110 was used for the 4x5 and T-Max developer for 120. He printed using a Saunders LPL XLG 4x5 enlarger, mainly on Zone VI Brilliant VC III fiber-based paper, or Ilford Multigrade. Agfa Neutol was used for prints. His craftsmanship paid off. Contrast and tonal scale in the book’s images are elegant, even in what I sometimes thought were spooky gray landscapes. When Peter came across Vietnamese ethnic minority groups in 1994, it took three months to get authorization to visit them for pictures. For these locations he brought Broncolor Impact lights, but the Red Dao people had no electricity, so he bought a generator in Hanoi and with an assistant took it north on a train. When they arrived, he says, “The villagers tied the generator and the cases with my lights and equipment to long bamboo poles, and carried them up the mountains where they live.” He stayed there a week.
“ Over the years in Vietnam,” Peter recalls, “my vision as an artist changed.” The transition was not so much about technique, it was centered in getting a deeper knowledge of the people and the landscape.” He was excited by much of what he saw in his images, he spoke the language better, had many friends, and increasingly, he felt very comfortable in Vietnam. Summing it up, Peter says that the country has become “a passionate obsession.” And he has conveyed his involvement into the book quite well. In the book’s foreword, author and painter Nguyen Quan writes, “Peter… serenely communes with mountains and rivers… rice fields and boats.… [He] got over all barriers quite naturally.… His views remain original… and distinctive, and he makes discoveries of his own Vietnam and its people.” Photographer James Whitlow Delano in the introduction compares his own impressions of Vietnam with viewpoints about living in Japan. “Peter has let Vietnam live within him,” Delano says. “[In his portraits] we are drawn in by the subtleties of individual facial expressions. On several occasions, Peter has described to me how his photography intentionally turns away from [the country’s] wartime past.”
Delano points out “one of Steinhauer’s most memorable landscapes,” Boat Market, Can Tho Province, taken from above moored longboats and sampans. “There is the transient feeling of a street photograph,” Delano notes. Peter Steinhauer mined a rich lode of subjects, blue skies or not, and his book includes an assortment of spiritually and esthetically moving images. The portraits are revealing of moods, and group images often offer the ambiance of shops and homes. Peter’s sense of chiaroscuro deftly dramatizes subjects in various settings. Having studied the pictures in Vietnam: Portraits and Landscapes over a period of time, I am sure now that the photographer, honoring his adopted country, was privileged and inspired to show a contemplative Vietnam to the world. Peter’s
web site shows more of his images: www.steinhauerphotography.com/. |
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