2022 Booooooom Photo Awards Winner: Vân-Nhi Nguyễn

What is the story behind your winning image?

While Vietnam represents for many in the West a place where a war was fought or athletic shoes are made, its people bear witness to a richer & far more complex reality. To expand and challenge the existing perceptions of Vietnamese people, it is to be able to see and understand the unruliness of it, through the excess of memories bestowed physically in this country; some given prominence through statues or architectures, while others are left to obliteration; the bodies become vessels for memories.

In the midst of the mayhem is the serene, a chaos masked by the dark of the late afternoon so to highlight the men’s naked body against the dark and ominous surrounding of a rural Hanoi riverside. Through carefully choreographed semiotics, the two can represent the current generation of people in Vietnam against their seemingly unchanged one party government, the existing narrative of them that exists before they can change it.