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twice at something you’d normally walk past, that’s the whole job. When I put the Vietnam work out as a body, I dedicated it to the people of Vietnam. That isn’t a flourish. They’re the ones in the frames. Q. Why is it that you choose to work with Fujifilm equipment? A. Because the controls are on the outside, where your fingers already are. Shutter speed on a dial, aperture on the lens, exposure compensation under your thumb. You can change a setting without taking the camera away from your eye, and on the street that’s the difference between making a frame and watching it leave. Almost everything I shoot is underexposed a stop or so to hold the highlights and let the shadows go – that is one dial, one thumb, no menu. Q. Tell us about Vietnam Streets. A. Sam Derbyshire, Adrien Jean and I kept ending up on the same photowalks in 2022, working the same districts of Ho Chi Minh City. Sam and I had been shooting early; a couple of beers into the middle of the day, we had it: an Instagram account curating Vietnamese photographers with an eye. Most of what got seen from Vietnam then was staged and composed. Real street work was happening, and almost none of it had a platform outside the country – partly a language thing. My background is in marketing, so the part I could contribute was making people more findable. I ran it day to day; Sam sent me what he’d found each week. When I moved back to the US I kept going, because by then I’d become convinced Vietnam needs an archive. Over 170 photographers published, past 7000 following. That word – archive – matters more to me now than it did at the start. We used to post constantly. I’ve come round to thinking that showing too much of a place does the viewer out of the experience of finding it themselves, so we post far less and more selectively, and the real work has moved to a proper website: longer, story-based pieces with the archive underneath. Q. What is the next milestone you aim to achieve with your photography? A. Prints, then a zine. I’ve printed six or seven times but almost always for other people. I’ve only made two for myself, and both are the kind of object that makes you realise a screen was never going to be enough. “ACCEPT THE HIT RATE. COMING HOME EMPTY IS NORMAL... THOSE WHOSE WORK YOU ADMIRE ARE SIMPLY THE ONES WHO KEPT GOING OUT”
30 FUJIFILM Focus Magazine
September/October 2026
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