“Other Streets is a marvelously evocative depiction of everyday life in Vietnam, which is made all the more poignant on learning that Mark was adopted from Vietnam and brought to the USA as a three year old child.”
--Chris Killip, author of In Flagrante, Seacoal, and Isle of Man; recipient of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award; and subject of solo exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, Le Bal, Tate Britain, Museo Reina Sofia, and The J. Paul Getty Museum
"Other Streets...offers an incredible look at daily life in post-war Vietnam. The photos...portray the quiet mundanities that are so often ignored in depictions of Vietnam. They are beautiful to witness, yet poignant in the eyes of this fellow refugee."
--Thanhha Lai, author of Inside Out & Back Again, Listen, Slowly and Butterfly Yellow; recipient of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Newbury Honor
2019 Photobook Awards - Official Selection, the L.A. Center of Photography
10th Annual Photobook Show - Official Selection, the Davis Orton Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography
diaCritics arts & culture of the Vietnamese and SE Asian diaspora - Artist Profile of Mark F. Erickson
"The photos in Other Streets provide a flicker of a glimpse of a time and place few people consider, and even fewer remember. Erickson favors lush chiaroscuro renderings...Sugar cane sellers, children playing badminton in the street, students with their square leather backpacks, vendors selling goods along the sidewalks, a barber giving a shave outdoors, with a mirror hanging from a nail in a tree--all these images give a real sense of what it was like to walk those streets."
--Dan Kelly, Harvard Magazine
“I grew up and left Vietnam at 12 years old and these photos really touch my heart. This book should be in every Vietnamese household. Personally, it brought back to me many memories.”
--Thao Bui, Association of Vietnamese Americans
"“You can’t go home again” is the famous quote by Thomas Wolfe, but what if you do not have any memory or recall of what home might be? Which is the case for Mark Erickson, who was born in Vietnam, then adopted at early age by an American family shortly after the Vietnam War. For Erickson a return to Vietnam in the early 1990’s was a trip to investigate his identity, born Vietnamese, but essentially an American. For Erickson, Vietnam is a foreign land, a place where he really did not know the language, and that if circumstances were different, he might be looking at himself thru his lens. This documentary project encompasses the Other Streets of his heritage.
At the time his return to Vietnam Erickson was in his very early twenties, recently graduating from Harvard after studying with the likes of documentary photographers Chris Killip and David Goldblatt. His physical appearance is Vietnamese probably with a very heavy American emphasis in his dress, language, demeanor and personal interactions. This is narrative is also a look back in time to 1993 the urban and rural Vietnamese landscape when Erickson created this black and white film project. And a snapshot of a transitional point for the country of his birth.
The resulting monograph reveals a flaneur’s walk-about through a rural and urban landscape of a transitional country. It is obvious that his subjects are aware of his presence, but they appear as questioning in their gaze as perhaps Erickson was in his. In one image of two individuals who are behind a gated enclosure I am reminded of the many photographs of the very end American Vietnam war when the American troops had to evacuate Saigon and the American embassy and leave many Vietnamese behind.
Erickson coolly observes social gatherings and events, capturing informal portraits of his traveling partners as well as creating lyrical poems, interspersed with photographs infused with wit and irony. His close and tight cropping, providing a sense of intimacy, reminds me of the work and style of his two photographic mentors.
My gripes with this book are the norm for a Blurb publication; the tight perfect bound binding, though Erickson provides ample classical white margins for his photographs that steer clear of any content being lost in the gutter. The black and white tonality of the printing varies from a slight greenish hue to a light plum, sometime on the same page. The images are printed on a slight creamy matte paper that reduces the overall image contrast of the black and white photographs.
The non-Blurb nicking of this book is that the resulting scanned images required for Blurb printing were not spotted, with white spots, film scratches and other artifacts detracting from the content of the images. The resulting rough appearance also provides a sense of nostalgia for this time and place."
--Douglas Stockdale, Photobook Journal
"I’ve always liked black-and-white (B&W) photography because of its visual tension and how it harkens back to the days when you didn’t have a choice in the matter. My memory tells me that such filmic representations of life offered some security in viewing the world because B&W photographs were so stark and honest in their appearance. My eyes tended to latch on to the subjects and settings in B&W photography more readily. They spoke to me louder and clearer. Shades of dark and light made me think of spectral phantoms appearing right before me. Shadows coming out of the shadows, so to speak.
Two years before the United States normalized relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1995, Mr. Erickson traveled to the country of his birth and took photograph after photograph. I can only guess how Erickson felt traveling around the country where his origins reside. I have no idea what his intentions were each time he clicked the button to bring his camera into motion in order to seize the exact moment between him and his subjects. All that there remains of that unique moment in time, in which Erickson found himself, are the photographs he collected between two covers and called OTHER STREETS. His photos are windows onto a land and a people that much of the world has been telling stories about, but that few truly know and understand.
When you take the time to peer deeply into Erickson’s photographs, they reflect a society and a culture slowly healing from decades of war but more than ready to transition into a future that can be celebrated, to which they can aspire. I couldn’t help but notice that many of the photographs are of boys, or young men, at play or at work. Knowing his own story could have turned on a dime at the time of his adoption to the U.S., I think of Erickson imagining how his own life could have turned out if someone in his family or neighborhood had made the fateful decision to keep him in Vietnam and raise him to be one of the very men he had photographed 20 years later as an American citizen. I’ve found that each time I take a long look into these subjects’ eyes and the ecosphere they inhabit my wonderment comes to the fore and some part of me starts to meld with their images. Thus proves the singular power of Erickson’s photography.
This is all to say that OTHER STREETS is a project in retrieval, renewal and remembrance. If you want to take a glimpse into the life of a country, and not a war, then Mr. Erickson’s photo book will lead you there. All you have to do is stand and observe."
--Kev Minh Allen, author of Sleep Is No Comfort: Essays and Go In Clean, Come Out Dirty: Poems
"Born in Saigon in 1972, Mark Erickson was evacuated as part of Operation Babylift in April 1975 and adopted by an American family. He returned to Vietnam in 1993 to photograph the country of his birth that he hardly knew.
The result, Other Streets (194 pp. $19.99, paper; $9.99, Kindle) is both a photographic achievement and a cautionary tale about self-publishing. Erickson graduated from Harvard with a keen understanding of Seventies street photography personified by Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. His photos are black and white with the characteristic black border that results from a filed film carrier.
“This book is not about the war or famous people or infamous places,” Erickson writes in the preface. “Instead, it is about the beauty that I found in ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places.” After “carrying this film around for over a quarter of a century,” he says, he put together his book.
It is a fine documentation of Vietnam at a particular time—long after the war concluded but before the economy lurched into overdrive. Mark Erickson lovingly depicts men and some women working and relaxing in a small and still-simple country. Many of the images are quite striking and one gets the feeling that his subjects were as interested in him as Erickson was in them.
Erickson is the book’s photographer, its author, its designer, and its publisher. This may suggest the book’s problem. It includes 90 duotones. A sharper, better presentation would have pared them down to perhaps 75.
The reproductions in the paperback version are not very good. This makes the photos overly dependent on the captions and the book easy to dismiss. That’s a shame because this volume contains some lovely photographs full of hope and a wistful longing.
A hardcover version of the book (with better-quality images) is available at the author’s website, markferickson.com
The e-book version (on Kindle) is available on line at this page on amazon.com "
--Michael Keating, VVA (Vietnam Veterans of America) Books
"Through the eyes of the son of Vietnamese immigrants, OTHER STREETS is one of the few things that bring a smile to my parents' faces. The depictions of ordinary people doing ordinary things illustrate a nuanced perception of Vietnamese people who are often painted as villain or victim by war stories and popular media. The subjects in these photos appear to be unapologetic as they cut hair, work, play cờ tướng, and roam the streets of their community."
--Tung Nguyen, Worksleeve Podcast
--Chris Killip, author of In Flagrante, Seacoal, and Isle of Man; recipient of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award; and subject of solo exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, Le Bal, Tate Britain, Museo Reina Sofia, and The J. Paul Getty Museum
"Other Streets...offers an incredible look at daily life in post-war Vietnam. The photos...portray the quiet mundanities that are so often ignored in depictions of Vietnam. They are beautiful to witness, yet poignant in the eyes of this fellow refugee."
--Thanhha Lai, author of Inside Out & Back Again, Listen, Slowly and Butterfly Yellow; recipient of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Newbury Honor
2019 Photobook Awards - Official Selection, the L.A. Center of Photography
10th Annual Photobook Show - Official Selection, the Davis Orton Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography
diaCritics arts & culture of the Vietnamese and SE Asian diaspora - Artist Profile of Mark F. Erickson
"The photos in Other Streets provide a flicker of a glimpse of a time and place few people consider, and even fewer remember. Erickson favors lush chiaroscuro renderings...Sugar cane sellers, children playing badminton in the street, students with their square leather backpacks, vendors selling goods along the sidewalks, a barber giving a shave outdoors, with a mirror hanging from a nail in a tree--all these images give a real sense of what it was like to walk those streets."
--Dan Kelly, Harvard Magazine
“I grew up and left Vietnam at 12 years old and these photos really touch my heart. This book should be in every Vietnamese household. Personally, it brought back to me many memories.”
--Thao Bui, Association of Vietnamese Americans
"“You can’t go home again” is the famous quote by Thomas Wolfe, but what if you do not have any memory or recall of what home might be? Which is the case for Mark Erickson, who was born in Vietnam, then adopted at early age by an American family shortly after the Vietnam War. For Erickson a return to Vietnam in the early 1990’s was a trip to investigate his identity, born Vietnamese, but essentially an American. For Erickson, Vietnam is a foreign land, a place where he really did not know the language, and that if circumstances were different, he might be looking at himself thru his lens. This documentary project encompasses the Other Streets of his heritage.
At the time his return to Vietnam Erickson was in his very early twenties, recently graduating from Harvard after studying with the likes of documentary photographers Chris Killip and David Goldblatt. His physical appearance is Vietnamese probably with a very heavy American emphasis in his dress, language, demeanor and personal interactions. This is narrative is also a look back in time to 1993 the urban and rural Vietnamese landscape when Erickson created this black and white film project. And a snapshot of a transitional point for the country of his birth.
The resulting monograph reveals a flaneur’s walk-about through a rural and urban landscape of a transitional country. It is obvious that his subjects are aware of his presence, but they appear as questioning in their gaze as perhaps Erickson was in his. In one image of two individuals who are behind a gated enclosure I am reminded of the many photographs of the very end American Vietnam war when the American troops had to evacuate Saigon and the American embassy and leave many Vietnamese behind.
Erickson coolly observes social gatherings and events, capturing informal portraits of his traveling partners as well as creating lyrical poems, interspersed with photographs infused with wit and irony. His close and tight cropping, providing a sense of intimacy, reminds me of the work and style of his two photographic mentors.
My gripes with this book are the norm for a Blurb publication; the tight perfect bound binding, though Erickson provides ample classical white margins for his photographs that steer clear of any content being lost in the gutter. The black and white tonality of the printing varies from a slight greenish hue to a light plum, sometime on the same page. The images are printed on a slight creamy matte paper that reduces the overall image contrast of the black and white photographs.
The non-Blurb nicking of this book is that the resulting scanned images required for Blurb printing were not spotted, with white spots, film scratches and other artifacts detracting from the content of the images. The resulting rough appearance also provides a sense of nostalgia for this time and place."
--Douglas Stockdale, Photobook Journal
"I’ve always liked black-and-white (B&W) photography because of its visual tension and how it harkens back to the days when you didn’t have a choice in the matter. My memory tells me that such filmic representations of life offered some security in viewing the world because B&W photographs were so stark and honest in their appearance. My eyes tended to latch on to the subjects and settings in B&W photography more readily. They spoke to me louder and clearer. Shades of dark and light made me think of spectral phantoms appearing right before me. Shadows coming out of the shadows, so to speak.
Two years before the United States normalized relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1995, Mr. Erickson traveled to the country of his birth and took photograph after photograph. I can only guess how Erickson felt traveling around the country where his origins reside. I have no idea what his intentions were each time he clicked the button to bring his camera into motion in order to seize the exact moment between him and his subjects. All that there remains of that unique moment in time, in which Erickson found himself, are the photographs he collected between two covers and called OTHER STREETS. His photos are windows onto a land and a people that much of the world has been telling stories about, but that few truly know and understand.
When you take the time to peer deeply into Erickson’s photographs, they reflect a society and a culture slowly healing from decades of war but more than ready to transition into a future that can be celebrated, to which they can aspire. I couldn’t help but notice that many of the photographs are of boys, or young men, at play or at work. Knowing his own story could have turned on a dime at the time of his adoption to the U.S., I think of Erickson imagining how his own life could have turned out if someone in his family or neighborhood had made the fateful decision to keep him in Vietnam and raise him to be one of the very men he had photographed 20 years later as an American citizen. I’ve found that each time I take a long look into these subjects’ eyes and the ecosphere they inhabit my wonderment comes to the fore and some part of me starts to meld with their images. Thus proves the singular power of Erickson’s photography.
This is all to say that OTHER STREETS is a project in retrieval, renewal and remembrance. If you want to take a glimpse into the life of a country, and not a war, then Mr. Erickson’s photo book will lead you there. All you have to do is stand and observe."
--Kev Minh Allen, author of Sleep Is No Comfort: Essays and Go In Clean, Come Out Dirty: Poems
"Born in Saigon in 1972, Mark Erickson was evacuated as part of Operation Babylift in April 1975 and adopted by an American family. He returned to Vietnam in 1993 to photograph the country of his birth that he hardly knew.
The result, Other Streets (194 pp. $19.99, paper; $9.99, Kindle) is both a photographic achievement and a cautionary tale about self-publishing. Erickson graduated from Harvard with a keen understanding of Seventies street photography personified by Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. His photos are black and white with the characteristic black border that results from a filed film carrier.
“This book is not about the war or famous people or infamous places,” Erickson writes in the preface. “Instead, it is about the beauty that I found in ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places.” After “carrying this film around for over a quarter of a century,” he says, he put together his book.
It is a fine documentation of Vietnam at a particular time—long after the war concluded but before the economy lurched into overdrive. Mark Erickson lovingly depicts men and some women working and relaxing in a small and still-simple country. Many of the images are quite striking and one gets the feeling that his subjects were as interested in him as Erickson was in them.
Erickson is the book’s photographer, its author, its designer, and its publisher. This may suggest the book’s problem. It includes 90 duotones. A sharper, better presentation would have pared them down to perhaps 75.
The reproductions in the paperback version are not very good. This makes the photos overly dependent on the captions and the book easy to dismiss. That’s a shame because this volume contains some lovely photographs full of hope and a wistful longing.
A hardcover version of the book (with better-quality images) is available at the author’s website, markferickson.com
The e-book version (on Kindle) is available on line at this page on amazon.com "
--Michael Keating, VVA (Vietnam Veterans of America) Books
"Through the eyes of the son of Vietnamese immigrants, OTHER STREETS is one of the few things that bring a smile to my parents' faces. The depictions of ordinary people doing ordinary things illustrate a nuanced perception of Vietnamese people who are often painted as villain or victim by war stories and popular media. The subjects in these photos appear to be unapologetic as they cut hair, work, play cờ tướng, and roam the streets of their community."
--Tung Nguyen, Worksleeve Podcast
