Several months ago, Montreal artist Anne Ramsden requested permission to reproduce one of my photographs taken in 2004 in Vietnam. She’s an accomplished artist and professor of visual arts at the University of Quebec. Her work has been exhibited across the globe, from Japan to the United States.Ramsden is putting together a new exhibit of posters called, “The Museum of the Everyday,” including one of the above photo. She has begun to post the exhibit online at Flickr. So far, however, the images are just available to her list of contacts. It looks like she is putting together an amazing collection of images. Additional information on the exhibit is forthcoming.
The women shown in this photo pedal their way to the villages, trading new kitchenware for old, for a small fee. They call themselves businesswomen. I happened to snap the shot from inside a moving van while in Vietnam as a 2004 World Affairs Journalism Fellow.
My assignment then was to tell the story of the Friends of Danang of McMurray, Washington County, Pa., a group of Vietnam Veterans whose members have been doing amazing humanitarian work on their former battlefields. Follow this link to a story about what would become some of my most fond memories of the country.
