Vietnam Travel Essay by Antoine Dupierre

Today, we’re featuring a Vietnam travel essay from film photographer Antoine Dupierre. Scroll below to view the images and read more from Antoine about exploring Vietnam…

Analog cameras and films used: Minolta XE-5 (Find at KEH Camera or on eBay), Pentax 17 (Find on Amazon) | Kodak Portra 400 (Find on Amazon), Kodak Portra 160 (Find on Amazon), Kodak UltraMax 400 (Find on Amazon), Kodak Gold 200 (Find on Amazon)

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Vietnam Travel Essay

By Antoine Dupierre

I’m Antoine Dupierre, a 16 y.o. beginner photographer. I started film photography last year, in November, and I fell in love with this art. I am currently studying at Louis-le-Grand High School, in Paris, France, and I am the president of the film photography club in my school. We even have a darkroom where we develop our rolls, print our photos, and scan our film!

During this summer, I went on a trip to Vietnam with my family (I am half Vietnamese from my father and half French from my mother), and it was the opportunity for me to train myself and enjoy this marvelous country.

I absolutely love this trip, and I met fantastic people… but sadly I also met poverty, starvation, and inequalities. This really shocked me and made me realize the chance I have to live the way I do. I always loved documentary photography and the feelings these photos gave me, but for once, I was the one crying and living these moments.

But even in the sadness, there is joy and hope. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people from different ethnic groups. They didn’t always understand my poor Vietnamese, but these meetings were always interesting and beautiful!

I tried my best to connect with local people, and to share my emotions and theirs in my photos. This trip made me realize a very important thing: because these people are suffering everyday and trying their best to subsist, their emotions are way more intense in a photograph, and so I learned that it was not me who made my portraits, it was the people I photographed.

This trip gave me a reason to continue my best in my studies, as I’d love to work in medicine, but it also gave me a life project: to document the life of the people who live in the darkness. I’m not a professional photographer, and I don’t plan to become one, but I’d love to become a better photographer. I wish one day someone will look at one of my photos, and say nothing, because the emotions he’ll feel will be too strong.

This is only the beginning of a (I hope) long adventure, and I want to live it at the maximum. That is also why I only do film photography, the fact that you actually physically capture a moment makes the photograph more real, and I think more of every photo, which gives more of a sense to them. I’ve never done photography before, and this discovery has changed my life and how I see the world.

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