Text and photos by Yen Duong
In the age of mass cultural and technological commodification of memories, we are capable of developing an intimate relationship with events we did not experience. In a constant process of internalizing overly exposed mediated representations, we bear memories on our body.
Every gesture is a reminder of the past. Every image, a cancellation of history.
In this ongoing work, Yen Duong attempts to examine the interrelationship between collective memory, private history, and political amnesia in modern day Vietnam. Inspired by the concept of “prosthetic memory” coined by Alison Landsberg in 1995, Yen documents the touches of time in her country’s changing landscape and juxtaposes images taken in both public and domestic settings with online found images of the American war in Vietnam.
Her approach is a self-inquiry towards the inherited and invented memories that inform her understanding of Vietnam’s turbulent history and how that connects to the present days.
In this vicious cycle of mundane madness, history begins where it has been forgotten.
Yen Duong is a Vietnamese photographer and journalist whose work tends to drift toward quiet moments in everyday life. An award-winning investigative journalist, she has photographed many critical stories throughout Vietnam and elsewhere, exploring themes from human trafficking, environmental and natural disasters, to the impact of rapid urbanization on marginalized communities. Her work has been published in Reuters, Bloomberg, Die Zeit, the Atlantic, The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, ProPublica, Rest of World and Al Jazeera, among others. She is currently based in Berlin, after spending several years working between Hanoi and Saigon, Vietnam.
