Brief Biography of Nguyen Ngoc Hanh, the Vietnam photographer

 

 

Nguyen Ngoc Hanh’s military career began with the French in about 1936, when he was taken from a Catholic orphanage in Hadong, North Vietnam at the age of ten. Like many unprotected colonial children he accompanied the French army in the forests of Vietnam in the enfante de troupe – living with the army and acting as servants. He was brought to France with the troupe in 1937 and educated under the Catholic Normal Section. He became part of the Vichy French army living in German-occupied France between 1940 and 1945, returning to his homeland (then called Indochina) under Free French recolonization in 1946, as a staff sergeant in the newly organized Vietnamese Airborne.

 

By the time he was twenty-three (1950) Nguyen Ngoc Hanh was transferred to the Quoi gia Vietnam (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) as a second lieutenant. He returned to France in 1952 to attend logistics training. He attended the French Photography School in Toulouse, graduating in 1956 as a photographer.

 

Captain Hanh of the Airborne Division returned to South Vietnam in 1956, two years after the Geneva Accords mandated partition of North Vietnam and South Vietnam. He served in the 1st and 3rd Batallions. His photographs during that period are often taken in the air, where he parachuted from 40,000 feet, free-falling for a considerable time before pulling the rip cord so that his parachute would not obscure the photograph. He founded the KBC Photography Club in 1957.

 

By the time he was thirty-four (1961) Nguyen Ngoïc Haïnh was assigned as the official war photographer for the South Vietnam Armed Forces. He was promoted to the rank of major through field commissions, and in 1968, the time of the Tet Offensive, was a Lieutenant-Colonel at forty-one years of age. He was wounded three times in combat between 1970 and 1975, primarily from groundfire directed toward the two-seater C-47 planes that the South Vietnamese Air Force reconnaissance flew underneath the Americans in the larger C-130s.

 

Nguyen Ngoïc Hanh was attached to the JGS (Joint ARVN-USA Staff) headquarters, Political Warfare branch, with a special pass from President Thieu that entitled him to personal helicopter escort anywhere he was assigned, to both ARVN and American stations.

 

His response to the surrender of South Vietnam to the invading North Vietnam Army on April 30, 1975, will come as no surprise to those who know him. He did not use his personal pass for helicopter transport because he “did not want to take pictures of generals running away.” He chose to remain with the soldiers who had no way out.

 

The consequences of his remaining in Communist Vietnam was imprisonment that was harsh, cruel, and personally vicious. He lived in a metal container in which he could neither stand up nor lie down for a year and four months. During this period he was removed for two hours daily and forced to kneel fettered on the ground in broken glass, facing and staring at the sun.

 

In 1983 a German amnesty group negotiated his release with the Socialist government of Vietnam and Nguyen Ngoc Hanh became the first  political prisoner to be released from the camps. He does not know why this group selected him for rescue. The most likely reason is the scope of his photographic reputation throughout Europe. which included the German “Fotomundi Excellence” prize.

 

As a photographer Nguyen Ngoc Hanh is internationally renowned. He was elected to the Top Ten Photographers of the Photographic Society of America in 1968. The same year he was “Top Ten” in PSA, he received a Gold Medal of the “Fotograkia la Presidenza Delta Camera” Italy; in 1969 he received the Excellence Award of the Federation Internationale Arte Photographie in Sidney and the Gold Trophy of the Fourth International Salon of Pictorial Photography in Thailand. His photographic honors include the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. New photographers that he has trained have themselves been accepted to R.P.S.

 

Although he was not in prison, Nguyen Ngoc Hanh was not free in Vietnam.  He determined to escape among the Boat People.  After four attempts, he was successful in reaching Malaysia in 1989. He was granted asylum to immigrate to the United States., where he is now a citizen.

 

As a refugee, he had nothing. No camera.  All his negatives were lost in the aftermath of the war.  Scarce copies of a book that the Republic of Vietnam had published in 1969 with many of his photographs, Vietnam in Flames, and a few photos from published work in American magazines and military archives was all that remained outside Vietnam. 

 

Living in San Jose, he began work with a scientific company called Cirrus Logic (now defunct in the dot-com bust) as a mail messenger.  He learned English by calling the people addressed by their names and talking with them.  He founded the VNPS, Vietnamese Photographic Society.  Then he began to reinvent himself as a photographer.

 

With a corps of students, friends, and models who were often actors or musicians, Nguyen Ngoc Hanh re-enacted some of the famous photographs of his career.  Always a portraitist, he posed his models reading letters, holding the dogtags of a deceased spouse or other memories of women of their soldier husbands.  He began to incorporate the landscape of California into his work, using waterfalls to convey the continued hope of South Vietnam democracy, and then of his own life journeys.  His friends are accustomed to leaving in the early a.m. to reach the perfect location for his vision.  Color became his art.  As his people celebrated in ethnic clothing and customs the photographer got close and closer, just as he had on the battlefield, to bring expression as life to the portrait.     

 

Nguyen Ngoc Hanh is a teacher and a mentor of other Vietnamese photographers.  His fine art book, “Trien Lam Nhiep Anh Nghe Thuot – Nguyen Ngoc Hanh Among Friends” is a collection that he selected from hundreds of submissions and crafted into a gallery portfolio.  The final section is his own work, some recovered from Vietnam in Flames and others as current as 2008. At the age of nearly eighty-five, the master is still creating, and inspiring creation in others. 

 

 

Jean Libby

VietAm Review