Vietnam through new eyes

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Until recently, Lynchburg native Leah Meadows didn’t know much about Vietnam, other than what she’d seen in the movies and in popular culture.

“The only images I had of it were from ‘Forrest Gump,’” she says, referring to the 1994 film, in which the titular character serves in the Vietnam War.

“It wasn’t our war,” says Meadows, 23 and an E.C. Glass graduate. “Our generation has another war.”

For older generations, like that of Meadows’ parents, Vietnam is often associated with the images they were exposed to growing up during the war.

“All we saw were these horrific black and white images,” says Lynn Shapiro, Meadows’ mother.

Even today, a quick Google image search for the country turns up mostly maps and those iconic black and white photos, like Huynh Cong Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Killing Fields,” in which a little girl runs screaming from a napalm attack. It appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1972.

“I think there’s a huge stigma in the word Vietnam,” Meadows says, “and that needs to be dispelled.

“We have nothing to show us what a beautiful place it is now.”

She’d like to be the one who shows off that beauty.

Last October, Meadows spent two weeks touring the country, capturing it and its people on camera.

Of the 800 pictures she took, 17 are on display at Magnolia Foods in an exhibit called “Vietnam: Through the Lens of a New Generation.”

“They’re beautiful,” says Ted Batt, exhibitions curator at the Academy of Fine Arts, of which Magnolia is a satellite gallery.

“I thought it would be great to show them because you don’t see many photos of Vietnam,” he says. “It’s a fresh perspective.”

Meadows’ exhibit includes idyllic landscape shots of the fishing boats in Halong Bay and the terraced hills of Sapa, a region of northern Vietnam that’s near the Chinese border.

But the majority of her work focuses on people simply going about the business of their daily lives: colorfully dressed women selling food in an outdoor market, men working on those fishing boats, a young girl climbing up a hill.

“That’s what’s affecting to me,” says Meadows, who has loved photography since she set foot in her first darkroom at 10 years old.

“That’s what Vietnam is about: the people.”

A lot of her photographs came about purely by chance, Meadows says, like “Determination Up Terraced Hills,” an action shot of a little girl marching up a hill while swinging a red umbrella.

“She was so fast, and I’m so happy I got to capture her.”

One of the most understated photos is “Window into 3 States of Mind,” a poignant portrait of two people gazing out a window, with a child asleep between them.

Meadows took it from a boat she was spending the day on. She didn’t want to stick the camera in their faces, so she got creative.

“I thought it was kind of rude to take their picture, and kind of invasive,” she says. “So I was facing the other way, and I shot it over my shoulder.”

Another one is called “Color in Mud” and features another brightly dressed woman trudging through a muddy, dilapidated village.

“It’s really easy to only choose pretty photographs,” Meadows says of the exhibit. “(But) their lives are hard. They have to work really hard to make a living, and this kind of shows that. And there’s still beauty in it.”

At the time of her trip, Meadows was working for an international jewelry company in Singapore, a job she landed right after her May 2008 graduation from the University of Virginia.

In helping her boss launch the company, Meadows’ duties included building the Web site, doing market research and taking pictures of the jewelry. (That job lasted six months, and Meadows, a women’s studies and anthropology major, now works on global health issues for the United Nations Foundation in Washington, D.C.)

During her stint in Singapore, Meadows got close to two weeks off each month, so she traveled to surrounding countries, including Cambodia, Malaysia and Hong Kong, by herself.

The Vietnam trek came just in time for her 23rd birthday.

“I had heard that it was changing rapidly, that it was becoming more like Thailand,” which has become a tourist destination, she says.

“I really wanted to see it. It was such a unique opportunity.”

Point-and-shoot digital camera in hand, Meadows set out to explore the country and get to know its people.

“I like traveling alone,” she says. “You meet a lot more people, and it forces you to come out of your shell. You’re never alone unless you choose to be. There are always other travelers and always locals.”

Still, it was all a little overwhelming at first, she says.

Meadows started out in Hanoi, a city that she says felt like chaos, with crowded streets full of people and speeding mopeds.

“But it’s not. You just have to get used to it,” she says. “As I began to get more comfortable and started talking to people about their lives, they really opened up.”

One woman she photographed invited Meadows into her hut for dinner, while another, depicted in a photo called “An Impressive Saleswoman,” walked with her for miles.

“She just latched onto me and wanted me to buy a purse,” Meadows says. “She followed me for about three miles, talking to me. She was so nice and funny.”

Most people were like them: kind and accommodating, she says, “not anti-American at all.”

In fact, they were very interested in American politics, and Meadows says she was asked more than once about the presidential election.

Meadows says she doesn’t want this exhibit to be a political statement. She just wants us to see what she saw.

“I’m not trying to say this (applies to) all of Vietnam, but this was my experience,” Meadows says.

“It’s from my lens.”

For more information about Meadows, visit www.leahmeadowsphotography.blogspot.com.