Archive - May 11, 2011

Vietnam Journeys Photography by Charles Fields Introduction and text by Mary Ann Bragg (Botswana 1980–82) Fields Publishing 264 pages $50.00 Reviewed by Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64)   WHEN THE PICTURE-TAKING COMMENCES at a family gathering of ours, just before the shutter clicks my mother-in-law jokingly commands everybody to “look pleasant!” In Fields’s big, handsome, underly satisfying book of photos of Vietnam and Vietnamese life, he seems to have urged Vietnam to “look pleasant,” and it obliged.   It’s true that Vietnam is in decent shape overall. The free-market reforms of the ’80s have the economy moving at a steady trot (though foreign investors complain that the bureaucracy is still godawful), and most of the population isn’t old enough to remember “the American war”; the chief preoccupation of the young seems to be charging into the neon-lit, mall-culture, consumerist future. Based on what I saw of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam . . .