Vietnam: A Photographic Journey by Geoffrey Clifford is a permanent exhibit of images purchased by the NCSU Libraries to engage library users with these vivid and thought-provoking images. The images are by Geoffrey Clifford accompanied by text from Dr. John Balaban.
About the Photographer
Geoffrey Clifford was a 21-year-old American army lieutenant when he first arrived in Vietnam in 1971. Flying combat helicopter missions over central Vietnam, the young pilot was awed by the terrain that unfolded below him. Between missions, he was restricted to his secured military perimeter, unable to experience firsthand the landscapes, cultures, and people that surrounded him.
After his service, Geoffrey Clifford became a successful location photographer. The war, he thought, was well behind him. In 1985, thirteen years after his last flight out of Da Nang, Clifford returned to photograph a Vietnam that he never got to know as a soldier: a place of exquisite landscapes, a place where ordinary people were going about their daily affairs unmolested by war.
Since his first postwar tour, Clifford has made 17 successive returns to Vietnam. His photographs of life in modern Vietnam speak to his own experiences of discovery of Vietnam and its resilient people. The photographs contrast timeless pastoral scenes with views of a modern culture beginning a new century. Clifford's images visually recover the beauty of Vietnam for those whose only memories of this nation stem from grim wartime reports. These images are but a sample of this work.
About the Captions
Exhibit script writer John Balaban first went to Vietnam in 1967 as a conscientious objector. As part of his alternate service, he volunteered for an organization that secured medical assistance for severely injured children. He returned in the early 1970s to record and translate the body of traditional Vietnamese oral poetry known as ca dao, which he subsequently published. He collaborated with Geoffrey Clifford on a book entitled Vietnam: The Land We Never Knew (1989) and a Smithsonian traveling exhibit entitled Vietnam: A Journey of the Heart (2001-2006). Balaban also helped publish the first dictionary of Nôm, the Chinese-like script that Vietnamese used for 1,000 years to record their own language and their vast heritage of poetry, history, medicine, and religion. (For more information, see the NCSU news release from Nov. 16, 2004.)
The author of twelve books of poetry and prose, Balaban has received numerous honors for his work, including the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Prize, the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award, two nominations for the National Book Awards, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University.
History of the Exhibit
Clifford's photographs were greeted with surprise and acclaim when they first appeared in Life magazine in December 1987 and later in his book Vietnam: The Land We Never Knew. From 2001 to 2006 the photographs traversed the United States as a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit entitled Vietnam: A Journey of the Heart. Images from the book and the traveling exhibit were selected to be part of the NCSU Libraries' permanent collection. This collection is exhibited here and on the 2nd Floor of the East Wing of D.H. Hill Library.
