IT’S 40 YEARS since the end of the Vietnam war – a conflict many of us probably know better from countless American war films than anything else.
It’s a truly stunning country, and one that Dublin photographer Ian Thuillier spent three months travelling around earlier this year with his girlfriend.
“I was in Cambodia two years ago and loved everything about it – the colours, the people, the food. I knew then that I wanted to get back to that part of the world, hence the Vietnam trip,” he told TheJournal.ie.
Travelling from Saigon in the south to Hanoi, and through all the villages in between, Thuillier saw a country that touched him deeply.
They’re an incredibly beautiful people, and very forgiving of the past. They don’t hold onto things like we do in the west.
Thuillier met survivors of the war, people who weren’t alive then but who exist day-to-day with the after-effects of the American bio weapon Agent Orange, and visited former battle sites transformed into beautiful landscapes.
It’s a country that’s still heavily mined so you can’t stray too far off the beaten path. There’s caves that were used as hospitals, munition dumps, bombs as tall as a man buried in the ground like art pieces.
The photos he took on his trip are compiled in a new book, ‘Vietnam: 40′ which has seen him shortlisted out of over 100,000 photographers worldwide for this year’s Sony World Photography Awards.
Ian will also hold his first exhibition on 10 December in Dublin.
An Indiegogo page to help fund the Vietnam:40 exhibition can be found here
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