Jamie has been documenting both the changing society and daily life in Vietnam since 1990, first as cinematographer on both documentaries and feature films and subsequently with his still camera. His use of both moving and still media, capturing sides of life not always considered, convey an intimate and honest portrait of a place and a people at once in flux and eternal."
Jamie Maxtone-Graham is a cinematographer formerly based in New York and subsequently Los Angeles. He began coming to Vietnam in 1990 when he was Director of Photography for the documentary feature From Hollywood To Hanoi and returned several more time during the decade, eventually shooting portions of the feature film Three Seasons (Ba Mua).
In 2007 Jamie became a Fulbright Research Fellow after receiving a grant funding his proposal to document contemporary youth culture in Vietnam. He and his wife, filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi, and their young daughter moved to Hanoi where he currently lives and continues to work both on commercial and narrative film projects, personal photography portfolios and other endeavors.
When Evening Comes: Night Market Portraits
"The photographs in this body of work came to be out of a couple of different but complimentary impulses.
The first was a simple curiosity out of what the Long Bien night market actually looked like at night. I have often been past the market during the day when it is closed and very little, if anything, is ever happening. It is, in fact, asleep. I found it is an entirely different place after night falls.
The second, more personal, challenge was to make photographs in a way different both technically and aesthetically and to engage the subjects, the people who work and even live in the night market, in a manner that required collaboration and ultimately a trust. I wanted to bring some of the aesthetic of the studio into the street and to do this at night in the market seemed both absurd and entirely logical. I like that kind of friction".
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