Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Photographic Representation and Transnational Commemoration in Contemporary Vietnam

Abstract

In April 2000, an exhibit displaying the works of photojournalists killed in action in the Indochinese Wars between 1945 and 1975 opened in Hòò Chíí Minh City. Based on the exhibit and interviews with Vietnamese photographers, this article examines photojournalism on the revolutionary side of the war and its relationship to transnational practices of memory that have transpired in recent years since the normalization of US––Vietnam relations. While scholarly research has focused primarily on US cultural productions of the war, this article incorporates Vietnamese representations into the analysis to compare the distinct and often conflicting visual records of war that the exhibit photographs produced.