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Documentary photographer William E. Crawford was one of the first Western photographers to gain access to North Vietnam after the war ended. He has photographed the capital, Hanoi, at regular intervals since 1985, concentrating on the colonial and indigenous architecture, urban details, landscapes and intimate portraits of people in their home settings, street scenes and the city’s surrounding countryside. Crawford is the only known Western or Vietnamese photographer to approach Hanoi as a study over time. In the years before the tourist boom, he was often the only American in the North. Crawford’s early photographs reveal a city in extreme disrepair, but with enough colonial and precolonial detail remaining to give a sense of what the city had looked like in better times. Here: 72 Mã Mây [Rattan Street], 1988. (Photo by William E. Crawford from the book “Hanoi Streets 1985-2015: In the Years of Forgetting”)
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