A Radial System: A photography exhibition

Minh Nguyễn

In his essay "Uses of Photography," art critic John Berger challenges the conventional understanding of photography as a linear medium––one that simply captures a moment in time or illustrates a single argument. Instead, he proposes that photographs should mirror how memory itself works: radially.

"There is never a single approach to something remembered," Berger writes. “Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way… they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday, and historic."

For this first extensive exhibition of Dogma’s “Battlefield Lens” collection in Vietnam, featuring photographs from the American war, I was drawn to Berger’s concept for two reasons. How does one exhibit images that have been so incessantly circulated that they have become almost impossible to see? One approach is to present them “radially,” alongside juxtaposing images and by opposing viewpoints, to break through their familiarity.

In 1965, LIFE magazine made an unprecedented decision to dedicate a 13-page photo essay spread: for the first time, readers found themselves confronted with full-color, graphic photographs over their morning coffee. By 1967, hundreds of accredited photographers from various nations were stationed in Vietnam. The war transformed photojournalism through new technology that enhanced speed and immediacy: motor-driven cameras, high-speed films for low light, and compact 35mm cameras. The volume of images was so immense that Associated Press built Saigon's first private satellite station solely for transmitting photographs, while commercial airlines operated daily flights to transport film to Tokyo laboratories. Each week, an estimated 80,000 photographs emerged from the conflict.

But who were these images for? Who needed to witness? What draws me again to Berger’s “Uses of Photography” is that it was a response to Susan Sontag's On Photography. While we know the American war brought combat into everyday homes (dubbing it “the living room war”), it also fundamentally reshaped photography’s discourse. Sontag’s On Photography collects writings from her trip to Vietnam in 1972, in which she expressed doubt about the political efficacy of images and wrestled with her complicity as a privileged American taxpayer on a press junket. Later she would conclude that foreign correspondents were producing "war pornography." Antiwar activists repurposed images like R.L. Haeberle's My Lai Massacre photograph to force Americans to confront their responsibility. The war became a harsh lesson for Western consciousness; gruesome images of slain Vietnamese civilians became their pedagogical tools.

Yet what of the Vietnamese photographers, hundreds of whom were employed by the state? Their images have been less circulated for various reasons: lost to inaccessible archives, poor storage conditions, general lack of interest in their perspective. The local photographs we present followed a different mandate: to capture beauty, construction, and a vision of socialist revolution. Despite severe shortages, practitioners found ingenious solutions—Dinh Dang Dinh developed film using charcoal-filtered water, while Dinh Thi Cuc transported her camera in a hollowed pineapple. In the Cu Chi tunnels' underwater darkroom, film was processed in complete darkness to avoid detection. Photographers like Vo An Khanh merged aesthetics with politics, capturing an almost utopian life in the guerrilla jungles—images that both rehumanize their subjects and make plain the ideological tensions driving the war.

We invite you to look deeper into these images—into the complex web of motivations and consequences that radiate from each frame. The patterns of dehumanization captured here—and how these images were deployed, circulated, and consumed—continue to echo in contemporary conflicts. As we witness new waves of war images flooding our screens today, we must ask, what do they reveal or obscure? These historical photographs are a window into the past, and a critical lens through which to examine our present moment, and our own position within it.

In partnership with the “Sensing Photography: Vietnam & Vectors of Global Histories” symposium, Feb 21 - 28, 2025