Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022. viii, 237 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$26.00, paper. ISBN 9781478010753.
The Vietnam War, also called the American War in Vietnam, has long been interpreted as a watershed for contemporary visual culture. Known famously as the first televised war and memorialized by some of the most recognizable photographs in recent memory, the civil conflict and subsequent US occupation of Vietnam unfolded in the context of the global Cold War and influenced a generation of Euro-American scholars to regard photography (and especially war photography) with critical suspicion. In Warring Visions, Phu offers readers an entirely fresh perspective on the role of photography in Vietnam, pushing beyond a typical American framework to centralize photographic practices of the North and South Vietnamese. Drawing on her family’s experience fleeing Vietnam after the war, alongside staged compositions, orphaned photographs recovered from dusty antique shops, and more traditional sources such as interviews and official state archives, Phu painstakingly examines the “visual struggle” that took place between these two opposing sides. “Warring visions,” she explains, “denote how Vietnamese communities actively enlisted images to project aesthetic and ideological positions, the stakes of which were nothing less than legitimizing competing claims to the nation” (15). Phu’s book is divided into two parts, the first of which examines North Vietnamese photography and its development of “socialist ways of seeing Vietnam” (29) and the second of which explores the importance of re-enactment, remembrance, and recollection for the South Vietnamese diaspora. While each section features images that I, as a scholar of both documentary history and the Vietnam War, have never seen before, the second half of the book is particularly indispensable for its inclusion of South Vietnamese perspectives, which are not contained in official archives and are thus more difficult to obtain and apprehend.
In highlighting the concept of visual struggle, Phu aligns herself with a newer generation of photography scholars, such as Ariella Azoulay, Susie Linfield, and Laura Wexler, who seek both to redress the vilification of photography’s role in political conflict, and to broaden the definition of war photography to include images which have been “disparaged or overlooked” (16). While Euro-American perspectives tend to privilege the immediacy of combat, spectacular violence, and documentary objectivity, such images represent a small fraction of the visual archives produced through national struggle. For example, in chapter 1, Phu examines photographs by the communist Vietnam News Agency, which often could not capture images of active combat due to technical limitations. While the VNA’s images have been dismissed as propaganda, Phu argues that manipulation is the rule, rather than the exception, in histories of conflict photography (76). For example, it is now widely known that American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady staged his images by moving the bodies of dead soldiers into various positions on the battlefield. Similarly, the infamous photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison and released in 2004 are no less war photographs for being staged and disseminated by American soldiers. Phu responds to Sabine Kriebel’s call “to take propaganda seriously,” which “opens up a more nuanced response to apparently simplistic images” (55). By paying close attention to the labour of North Vietnamese image-makers, such as those who set up makeshift dark rooms in the jungle, or painted photographs to evoke revolutionary futurity in Vietnam Pictorial, Phu demonstrates that many of the images produced by the Vietnamese have been neglected, to the detriment of historical scholarship.
In chapter 2, Phu examines the contrasting means by which North and South Vietnamese officials sought to mobilize the symbol of the “revolutionary Vietnamese woman” (86). By emphasizing the transpacific circulation of such images, Warring Visions not only explores how Vietnamese photography shaped Vietnamese perceptions of the war, but also how the practice was deployed in a visual struggle for international public opinion. South Vietnamese perspectives, for example, are less widely known globally due to their repression by the North Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and the resulting tendency (in Euro-American scholarship) to view Vietnamese experiences of the war as monolithic. In chapter 3, Phu analyzes the forms of re-enactment and remembrance through which the diasporic South Vietnamese redress this erasure. As a documentary technique, this diasporic re-enactment follows a precedent established by Vietnamese conflict photographers who laboured to document a Southern perspective (129). Finally, in chapter 4, Phu ruminates on the absence of a photographic record for the South Vietnamese diaspora, given that many refugees “hid, altered, abandoned, buried, or even burned photos that contained incriminating evidence of collaboration” (148). As such, Phu turns to family photographs because “no official Vietnamese archive of South Vietnam exists” (149). Perusing images from her own family records, as well as an impressive array of photographs recovered from discarded albums, Phu illustrates the wealth of historical knowledge that can be gleaned from sources which have heretofore been considered peripheral to the conflict itself. “Indeed, when considered closely,” she argues, “family photography can also be seen as war photography” (151).
Phu’s book thus has tremendous importance as a pioneering study of the visual archive produced through national struggle in North and South Vietnam. In fact, I contend that Warring Visions is essential reading for anyone interested in the war and its influence on visual culture.
Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande
Carleton University, Ottawa