A while back I was assigned by Toulouse-Hanoi City Hall co-op to create a set of pictures for the Center of Cultural Exchange of the Old Quarter. The goal of this project was to depict the traditional activities of the 36 streets of Hanoi.
As said above, this project was quite challenging because the old town of Hanoi is a magical organized chaos but with traffic, motorbikes parked on sidewalks, and overall hectic activities, it gets really hard to have a clean shot. It needs patience, a lot.
Other challenge I had to face is that people, well, most of them are kind of pissed by tourism and I can definitely understand that. How would the majority of us would response if on a daily basis, hundreds of happy fellas were pointing at our face a camera to take pictures they find "exotic" ? not very kindly I think.
I had contacts of people aware about the project and so those places visited were the easy ones. But for most of it, things needed to be done on the fly. And here again it taught me patience, as I had to show myself, once, twice, even more sometimes, get a bit pushy trying to create an interaction speaking in Vietnamese with residents.
At the end things went the way I wanted and I'm pretty happy with this set of images that remain as a permanent collection in the museum.
Here are some of my personal picks
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www.francisrouxphotography.com
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