Vietnam 2022 Collection

CROSSING BRIDGES — VIETNAM

In October 2022, after several years in which international travel had largely disappeared from my life, I travelled through Vietnam as part of Crossing Bridges, organised by the Australian Photographic Society.

Returning to unfamiliar streets and landscapes with a camera reminded me of something fundamental about photography: the pleasure of simply looking.

The journey took me from the extraordinary rhythm of Hanoi's streets to villages surrounding the city, the waterways and limestone formations of Tràng An, and the mountainous landscapes and communities of Hà Giang in northern Vietnam.

In Hanoi, I was drawn to the constant movement of everyday life — motorcycles flowing through intersections, people working and gathering on the streets, the narrow architecture of the Old Quarter and the layers of Vietnamese, Chinese and French influence visible throughout the city.

At Quang Phu Cau, the traditional process of incense making created extraordinary patterns of colour, repetition and human activity. Bundles of incense transformed working spaces into intensely graphic environments, while the people making them remained at the centre of the story.

The experience at Minh Khai Village was very different. Here, enormous quantities of discarded plastic were collected, sorted and processed for recycling. Visually it was confronting and fascinating: mountains of material created unexpected landscapes while revealing another side of consumption, labour and the objects we so easily discard.

At Tràng An, the visual language changed again. Limestone karsts, waterways, vegetation and ancient structures created a landscape of extraordinary stillness. Travelling through it by boat offered an entirely different rhythm from the density and movement of Hanoi.

Further north, Hà Giang and the Đồng Văn Karst Plateau revealed vast mountain landscapes, terraced fields, remote roads and communities shaped by geography and tradition. The scale of the landscape was immense, yet it was often the smaller human moments within it that interested me most.

This collection is not intended as a comprehensive document of Vietnam. It is a photographic record of what caught my attention during those days — people, movement, colour, repetition, architecture, landscape and the details of everyday life.

Looking back at the photographs, I can also see many of the visual elements that have always interested me as an artist: strong graphic composition, scale, human figures within larger environments, controlled colour and the relationship between people and place.

Photography has taken me to extraordinary places throughout my career, but the reason I continue to make photographs remains remarkably simple.

Something catches my eye. I stop. I look. And I want to remember it.

All artworks by Lisa Saad are produced as limited-edition fine-art photographic prints and framed canvas prints. Each work is professionally printed using archival-quality giclée printing processes with archival pigment inks on premium fine art paper or museum-grade canvas substrates to ensure exceptional longevity, colour stability and presentation quality.

All edition works are individually numbered and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity. Edition details are noted on the artwork and/or accompanying documentation.

Lisa Saad’s photographic digital art practice combines original photography and imagery from her extensive photographic archive with appropriately licensed source material, digitally created elements and, where relevant, selected emerging technologies. Adobe Photoshop remains the primary environment in which these elements are extensively manipulated, reconstructed, composited and refined to create the final artworks.