Warring Visions

“Thy Phu presents a searing and moving lesson in unlearning US imperialism and its entanglement with photography. Through diverse visual archives, she brilliantly shakes core assumptions about photography and war, including the ‘Vietnam War’—actually an ‘American war’ in Vietnam—and what came to be its iconic photographs and overlooked images. Phu's careful work of upsetting imperial geographies and imaginaries of the Cold War (such as North/South) brings that war back home to the South Vietnamese diaspora in a way that presciently speaks to the current moment.” -- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, author of * Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism *
"In this elegant and insightful study, Thy Phu turns to Vietnamese photographers, considering journalistic work, personal and family photos, reenactments, and artistic uses, all with the intent of exploring how Vietnamese people saw themselves and each other through the lens. From the homeland to the diaspora and back, she shows the power of photography to mobilize nations and communities, commemorate loss and absence, and provoke solidarity. What Phu finally shows, so powerfully and persuasively, is that Vietnamese people have always seen and been seen by themselves if not by others.” -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of * The Sympathizer *
"Intriguing. . . . [Phu] is an elegant, accomplished writer. . . ." -- Thomas A. Bass * Mekong Review *
"Warring Visions ... provokes a reevaluation of war photography, of socialist visuality, of memory, loss and diaspora. Reading it has not displaced the lasting power of the image of Kim Phuc from my visual memory, but it has made me think anew about what the stubborn persistence of this image has rendered invisible." -- Hirsch, Marianne * Canadian Literature *
"Warring Visions is an effective examination of the multifarious ways that the tool of photography signifies. . . . Valuable for anyone interested in visual culture, archival studies, and diasporic identity against the grain of Western visions of imperialism." -- Collin Hawley * Lateral *
"Phu’s book . . . has tremendous importance as a pioneering study of the visual archive produced through national struggle in North and South Vietnam. In fact, I contend that Warring Visions is essential reading for anyone interested in the war and its influence on visual culture." -- Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande * Pacific Affairs *
"Phu offers an important demonstration that different viewers have different interpretations of photographs—i.e., makers and viewers may read reality in a photograph differently. . . . Readers should take this book seriously as they respond to contemporary photographs of all kinds. Highly recommended. All readers." -- C. Chiarenza * Choice *
"A radical re-examination of the relationship between photography and the Vietnam War, Warring Visions denaturalises the preoccupation with immediacy that has come to dominate accepted conventions of war photography. Phu illustrates how the boundaries that constitute and constrain the genre are not inevitable, but rather are the products of Anglo-American photojournalistic standards – the ones that have been implicitly reified by official histories of photography." -- Kimberly Schreiber * History of Photography *