VietNamNet – Vietnam has had photographs of Mui Ne sand hills or faces of old ethnic minority people win many international prizes. However, photographers are not finding other things to photograph.

The laziness of Vietnamese photographers has made the country’s art dull. This is the opinion of many famous artists and photographers.

Mr Do Phan, who is an artist, said that he doesn’t want to see photos of Mui Ne sand hills and the wrinkled faces of old ethnic minority people anymore.

While they don’t bother to find other angles or other things to take photos of, caption notes are also very monotonous. The most common word chosen for Vietnamese photographs is “dance”. Many photographs’ captions are something like, “The dance of fog”, “The dance of sunrise”, “The dance of sunset”, and so on and so on.

After visiting many exhibitions of photographs, Do Bao, a photographer, asked, “Vietnamese is a rich language, why are these captions always the same?”

A lot of Vietnamese photographers have won many international prizes with photos of Mui Ne sand hills. Nguyen Cao Dam won a prize in Madrid, Spain; Le Anh Tai was a grand prize winner in 1965; Khuu Tu Chan won two bronze medals in Hong Kong and Korea; Vo Van Thanh won second prize in a competition in Louvain, Belgium in 1970.

If one compares the recently taken photographs of Mui ne with the ones taken in the past, the photographs don’t look different in terms of angles as well as objects, although nowadays there are a lot of hi-tech cameras that could help to increase the quality of photographs.

Vietnamese photographers have not been creative in finding new things but only have ambition for international photography prizes.

This has made the country’s contemporary art suffer.

(Source: LD)