Every city has its , and in Hanoi the most one unfolds just before dawn. Vendors arrange their stalls with care, stacking herbs into fragrant green towers. Elderly men gather by the lake to practice tai chi, their movements and unhurried.
An Bui, a photographer, has spent a decade trying to capture this hour. "Daylight makes the city ordinary," she says. "But at dawn, everything feels , as if the streets were still deciding what to become."
Her latest exhibition images taken twenty years apart. The buildings have changed almost beyond recognition, yet the gestures : the same bowed heads, the same steaming bowls. Progress, her photographs suggest, is remarkably selective about what it sweeps away.