Ed Kashi Spent Two Weeks Photographing Saigon From the Back of a Motorbike
(This is the story behind the photograph, a glimpse into the moment, the process, and the vision that brought it to life.)
Sometimes the best project begins when the first idea fails.
You arrive with a plan, but what you find does not fit it. The harder you try to make the original idea work, the easier it becomes to miss what is actually happening around you. Ed Kashi faced exactly this problem when he arrived in Vietnam in 1994.
His planned story never happened.
Instead, he noticed the motorbikes.
They were everywhere in Saigon, carrying people, children, animals and construction materials through the city. Kashi hired a young Vietnamese driver and spent the next two weeks photographing from the back of one. What began as a failed idea became a different way of seeing the city.
Ed Kashi arrived in Vietnam without a clear plan.
It was 1994, and Vietnam was beginning to open to the outside world. Kashi had travelled to Ho Chi Minh City, still commonly called Saigon, intending to photograph youth culture. But once he arrived, the idea began to fall apart.
“I wanted to do something on youth culture. Vietnam was starting to open up a bit, but I got there and realised I actually didn’t know how to tell that story.”
What caught his attention instead was happening all around him.
The streets were filled with motorbikes and bicycles. People travelled to work on them, carried children on them and transported things that seemed far too large for two wheels. For Kashi, who was visiting Vietnam for the first time, the movement of the city became more interesting than the story he had originally planned.
“I had been to Asia before, but I’d never quite seen anything like it. So I just decided in the moment that I would spend two weeks on the back of motorbikes, photographing the world of this city.”
He hired a young Vietnamese driver who spoke enough English to understand his directions. Then, for two weeks, Kashi photographed from the back of the motorbike.
Sometimes he faced forward. Sometimes he turned around and sat with his back towards the driver. At other moments, he held the camera away from his face and photographed from different positions.
“I hired a young kid who spoke enough English so I could give him some direction. He probably thought I was insane, but it was fun. Sometimes I photographed looking backwards, sometimes facing forward, holding the camera from different positions or bringing it to my eye.”
He was working with Leica cameras and black-and-white film. There was no screen to check what he had captured. The city moved around him while he made photographs from inside its traffic.
The photograph of the young couple came near the end of a day.
It was dusk. Kashi and the couple were both on motorbikes, surrounded by traffic and exhaust fumes. The man had a cigarette in his mouth. Behind him, a woman covered her face.
The traffic may have slowed them almost to a stop, but nothing in the photograph feels completely still.
“Both of us were moving. Although the traffic and pollution were insane, I think in that moment we had maybe stopped or weren’t going very fast. There were other images I made when we were going full speed.”
Kashi was also experimenting with a technique he had used earlier in his career: on-camera flash combined with a slow shutter speed.
The flash could hold a person sharply for an instant, while the longer exposure allowed movement to continue around that frozen point. It suited the experience of photographing from a motorbike, where the photographer, subject and surrounding city could all be moving at once.
“I was playing with flash, going back to my roots, using on-camera flash with a slow shutter speed.”
Then he saw the couple.
The cigarette, the covered face and the evening traffic came together for only a moment. Kashi did not stop the couple or arrange the scene. He photographed what appeared beside him.
“I was struck by this guy smoking and her covering her face. The pollution was terrible because these were all two-stroke motorcycles, horribly polluting engines. It was a moment captured. An abandoned moment captured.”
As the two weeks continued, the motorbike became more than a way to move through Ho Chi Minh City. It gave Kashi a position from which he could watch how much of everyday life happened on two wheels.
He remembers seeing a little girl doing her homework with her book resting against her father’s back as he drove. Other people carried animals, construction materials, long pipes and sheets of plywood. Kashi even photographed a funeral.
“You name it. People were carrying animals, materials for construction, long pipes, pieces of plywood. There was even a funeral I covered.”
The original idea of photographing youth culture had disappeared. In its place was something Kashi had not planned before arriving.
The photograph of the couple belongs to a way of working that Kashi later described as the “abandoned moment.”
For him, these photographs are connected to moments when control becomes less important. The photographer still makes decisions about position, exposure, flash and timing, but cannot control everything happening inside the frame.
In Ho Chi Minh City, that uncertainty was built into the process.
Kashi was moving. His subjects were moving. The traffic around them was moving. He was working with film and could not immediately see the result. The photograph depended on preparation, but also on being ready when something unexpected appeared beside him.
For a fraction of a second, the movement stopped.
Then the traffic continued.
Sometimes the best project begins when the first idea fails. You arrive with a plan, but what you find does not fit it. Story Behind The Photograph