Bảo Long

A playful moment by a fisherman in Hội An, captured by amateur photographer Sophia Spurgin, recently won first prize at the London Camera Exchange Award. 

Days later, a well-known Vietnamese photographer sparked debate by posting a strikingly similar image of the same man. Soon enough, my own Facebook feed filled with variations of that moment, captured by different lenses, at different times, yet somehow, shockingly similar.

The subject is Đỗ Văn Mười, a fisherman who for more than 40 years has earned a precarious living casting lift nets along the Thu Bồn River. Today, he has become a familiar figure in Việt Nam's photography scene, his daily routine quietly transformed into a repeatable visual performance.

This is not just a story about one fisherman. It is about a photography culture that has, in many cases, replaced spontaneous life experiences with staged certainty.

As tourism has expanded, so too has a parallel industry of "photography tours" catering to the demand for visual consumption. At their best, these tours are led by skilled photographers who guide participants toward genuine encounters with local life. But more often, they follow a different script: fixed routes, scheduled stops and local 'models' prepared in advance to pose for that "perfect" shot.

Why spend days waiting for a fleeting, uncertain moment when you can pay for a hundred "decisive moments" on demand, carefully arranged, perfectly lit and reliably repeatable?

In this context, debates over who "owns" such images feel almost beside the point. These photographs are not rare discoveries but reproducible products. Some go on to win major awards, others sell for thousands of dollars, and many more circulate online under the label of "daily life", gathering admiration for their apparent authenticity.

But who, then, is the true artist behind these images?

Perhaps it is the tour guide who recognises the visual potential of a 70-year-old fisherman and builds an entire experience around it. To be fair, such arrangements can bring tangible economic benefits, allowing locals to sustain their livelihoods in the face of rapid tourism-driven change.

Or perhaps it is Mười himself. Over time, he has refined his presence before the camera: the weathered shoulder half-exposed, the deliberate choice of red shirts against the muted tones of river and sky, the subtle choreography of gesture and timing. In many ways, his performance contains as much intention as any photographer’s composition.

Yet Mười is not an isolated case. He is part of a broader pattern, one that stretches across the country. The Thu Bồn River is just one stage in what increasingly resembles a nation-sized theatre of images.

Travel north to Sa Pa or Hà Giang, and similar scenes unfold. Children in pristine traditional dress wait by the roadside with carefully arranged props, not in the midst of daily life, but in anticipation of the next camera. In craft villages, artisans only reconstruct work for visitors, guiding lenses toward the most photogenic angles.

Staged photography, in itself, is not inherently problematic. It can be a legitimate artistic choice, even a form of collaboration between subject and photographer. The issue lies in the ambiguity when performance is presented as unmediated reality.

As Susan Sontag, an American critic, observed decades ago, photography can become "a way of refusing experience… by converting it into an image, a souvenir". In much of today's visual tourism, that transformation feels complete. Travel becomes less about encountering life than about collecting its most photogenic imitations.

This has given rise to a kind of half-formed genre. Images that are not constructed enough to declare themselves as conceptual, yet not honest enough to be considered documentary. They exist somewhere in the realm of aesthetically pleasing, easily consumed and endlessly repeatable.

More concerning is how this trend is reinforced. Photography associations and competitions continue to reward these images, celebrating them as representations of culture and everyday life. In doing so, they risk legitimising a narrow visual language, one that favours familiarity over insight, and surface over substance.

The result is a growing archive of images that look increasingly alike: polished, emotive and quietly detached from the realities they claim to depict.

It may be time for these institutions to reconsider what they choose to recognise. Not every beautiful image needs to be mistaken for truth. And not every performance should pass as documentation of real life.

Until that distinction becomes clearer, the question will remain, not just who owns the image, but what, exactly, is it that we are looking at? VNS