Tessa Bunney is a documentary photographer, whose work considers the landscape and how it is shaped by human activity. Her project Hand to Mouth, on the villagers and Nomadic Shepherds of the Romanian Carpathian Mountains was published and exhibited by the Impressions Gallery, Bradford, and was shortlisted for the Descubrimientos PHE Award at PhotoEspaña in 2006. Home Work, which looks at domestic labour in and around Hanoi, Vietnam, was recently published as a monograph by Dewi Lewis Publishing. Here she discusses that project.

BJP: Why did you start the project? How does it tie in with your previous work?

TB: Home Work started in a very different way to my previous work, ie it was neither a commission nor a long held desire to visit Vietnam or cover a particular issue there. I was given an opportunity to accompany my husband on a business trip to Vietnam - for two months initially, which then extended to six months and then another six months. In fact prior to these visits I would have said I wouldn’t have chosen to undertake a project in Vietnam because the legacy of war imagery is so great, although I do believe there is more to the country than war.

The trip was quite short notice, and I didn’t have time to do any research before I went, but I knew that although I was based in Hanoi, I wanted to get out of the city as soon as possible. I bought a map of the area which had some of the ‘craft villages’ I photographed marked on it, and this was the start of an all consuming project during my time in Vietnam (as well as looking after my one-year-old son!).

Most of my work looks at peoples’ relationship to their environment and the changing nature of rural life and in this sense Home Work connects with my previous work, this work however looks more closely at the grey area between the countryside and the city and the effects of urbanisation. 

BJP: How did you work? Was it hard to convince people to be photographed? Did you need to take time to get to know them?

TB: I worked closely with a translator and we just travelled to particular villages – initially from the map and my guide’s own knowledge and later by word of mouth and discoveries as we were driving around the city and its environs. I selected translators who had knowledge of the countryside and its issues either by having been born there or having also worked with NGOs. The Vietnamese culture is such that if you want to visit someone you would just turn up, no appointment required!

The people in the villages were friendly and welcoming on the whole, some of the younger women were reluctant to be photographed in what they perceived as ‘dirty’ working clothes but there was no problem photographing peoples’ homes. The translators chatted to the villagers while I took the photographs - working overseas where you can’t speak the language takes away the personal contact I am used to to some extent, and often we visited villages only once.

Sometimes people phoned us to say they were doing a particular thing. With over 1000 villages with particular specialities in the Red River Delta, the desire to keep on travelling and seeing what was made or happening in the next village was at times overwhelming! I got the film processed in Vietnam as I was working which was really great, to be able to see the work as it developed was enormously useful. Normally I would arrive back home from a trip with no real idea of what had worked and what hadn’t.

BJP: What kit did you use? Why?

TB: I used my standard kit – a Hasselblad 503CW and whatever film I could get hold of. I always use a waist level finder as I feel it’s less intimidating than having a camera in front of your face when photographing people. I started off using fill-in flash but quickly discarded that in favour of using available light and tripod – all the photographs in the book, even the working portraits were taken using tripod and available light. This was extremely challenging when the light was low inside the houses in the dull and gloomy winter light.

BJP: Do you hope this book will advocate for the people you shot in some way?

TB: The issues this project threw up are complex. The families need this work to survive but meanwhile they are polluting their home environments and suffering from illnesses associated with the pollution. Without exception all the farmers would prefer to be exclusively farming if they had enough land, not producing these other items in addition, but the little bit of money they make allows them to survive.

BJP: How many photographs did you end up with, and how did you boil it down to the book edit?

TB: I took around 300 rolls of film so that’s more than 3000 images – but I took a lot of those because I felt I had to. Having been invited into peoples’ homes it seemed rude not to take the pictures, even if I knew they wouldn’t be used. I’ve got various stages of editing in separate boxes – the book edit was a tighter version of the edit for the exhibition. There were many people involved in editing the work at various points: curators, the book designer, fellow photographers but at the end of the day I had the final decision of what was included. I’m still wondering why I left particular images out.

BJP: The book is quite small, why did you opt for this format?

TB: The format is loosely based on a notebook I repeatedly saw being used in shops and businesses around Hanoi – I got obsessed with tracking one down and eventually found various colour versions of it in the Old Town. I wanted to produce a book which was journal-like, to reflect the personal journey I had made, and also a beautiful object to do justice to the incredible craftsmanship I had seen during my time in Vietnam.

BJP: What have you got planned next?

TB: Since I got back from Vietnam I have been working on various residencies in the UK and in Finland, strands of which I am hoping to continue with in the future. Whilst I was in Hanoi I also travelled a couple of times to China, including a short trip to Yunnan province just an hour away, and I have returned a couple of times to work on a project about the ethnic minority women and their way of life. I’m still working on it and I plan to go again in October, but I’m still not exactly sure where it’s heading.

I have had a long held desire to do a project in Russian Karelia amongst many other ideas - I probably don’t have enough years left to do them all. And in the meantime I have a lot of freelance commissions on the go, which will hopefully help fund these projects.