‘Street Flower’, Paris Photo CCI Weekend Focus On Photography, Espace Lhomond Paris, 12-15 November, 2015.

‘Street Flower’ originated in Vietnam (2013) whilst researching Botanic Gardens as expressions of Colonial Expansion, which significantly contributed to science and agriculture (Brockway, 1979). The enquiry was developed through a Paris residency programme (2014), research of the Albert Khan Archive (Paris 2015), and co-creation with a generation of Vietnamese young woman - who traverse the cities and landscape of Vietnam in floral coloured cotton jackets. New portraits of these women, now living in Paris, and of the daughters of women who travelled by boat to Europe in the 1970’s, were created. The photographic methodology involved both collaborative staged settings (with the Vietnamese woman) and observed practice, utilising matching backdrops and jackets as narrative vehicles. In Vietnam non-traditional, brightly coloured, floral jackets are worn to protect the skin from the sun. They have become a part of contemporary culture, referencing a forward-facing society. Moving en masse through the streets of Hanoi and Saigon, by foot or moped, the woman appear like moving gardens. The displacement of the Vietnamese jackets re-locates and exposes aspects of Vietnamese sun, style and subtlety of substance, within a Parisian landscape. Despite the abundant documentation of Vietnamese refugee experiences, these women have traditionally remained silent (Nguyen, 2009). Mainly due to the sublimation of individual identity, and in particular female identity, within a society that favours the collective. While the choice of jacket and location, are used to tell us something about the subject, the individual’s pose, incomplete gesture and body language reflect their personal time spent in collaboration and in motion together throughout the city. These women offer a purposefully occluded view of living between ‘States’, in an age of unprecedented, revolutionary connectivity & communication. Two perspectives are offered, firstly the curiosity of a subjective western observer and secondly the co-creative view of the Vietnamese women’s collective.