Story: Huong Quynh
Photos: Hai Au Club
For 36 years, photographers in the Hai Au Club have documented Vietnam from a female perspective.
Some photographic journeys begin with a love of beauty. Yet as they unfold, they often become deeper encounters with life itself. For the Hai Au (Seagull) Club – the only all-women photography club in Vietnam – these journeys have continued for 36 years, taking members and their cameras to many regions, villages, and encounters with women across the country. From mist-covered highlands to river landscapes, from colorful brocade garments to unguarded smiles beside the fire, members of the Hai Au Club capture the beauty of Vietnam through a feminine, sensitive, and empathetic perspective.
For women photographers, photographing ethnic minority women is not simply about documenting clothing, festivals, or scenes of daily life. Their art can also express solidarity among women. Behind each image lies the ability to listen, observe, and approach their subjects with a distinctive gentleness. Perhaps because they, too, are women, they readily recognize the unspoken stories carried in upland women’s eyes, posture, hands, and smiles: patience, endurance, grace, dignity, and a resilient vitality passed down through generations.
Behind these beautiful photographs lies a great deal of quiet effort. For men, traveling far from home to create work, crossing long distances, climbing mountains, wading through streams, waiting for the right light and the right moment is already a challenge. For many of the Hai Au Club’s members, those journeys also involve the ordinary concerns of a woman’s life: being a mother, a wife, caring for the family, arranging work, and then shouldering the camera to set off. Some make use of every holiday. Some return from a trip only to plunge straight back into preparing family meals, caring for young children, and helping elderly parents. Yet it is precisely through that balance that their photographs carry a special energy: enduring, gentle, yet never fragile.
Women in Vietnam’s ethnic minority communities have long inspired the creative work of the Hai Au Club’s members. Through their lens, these highland women do not appear merely as photographic subjects, but as bearers of beauty, culture, and communal memory. Each woman brings her own distinct presence, contributing to the rich picture of Vietnam’s many ethnic communities.
When admiring the work of the Hai Au Club, viewers see both the beauty of Vietnam and that of the women behind the camera. Lovers of art and life, these female photographers dare to venture out and pursue their passion, quietly preserving cultural memories with great care.
