About this Book

"2019 Los Angeles Center of Photography Photobook Awards Selection" --Exhibition September 16-October 16 @LACP"#1 new release for Photojournalism, July 2019" --AmazonMark F. Erickson was born in Saigon in 1972, evacuated as part of Operation Babylift in April 1975, and adopted by an American family. At Harvard College, he studied Vietnamese history and documentary photography.In 1993, Mark returned to Vietnam and created a portrait of the Vietnamese in the spirit of Robert Frank's The Americans, Rene Burri's The Germans, and W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project.​Other Streets includes 90 duotone photographs.​Preface to Other Streets: Scenes from a Life in Vietnam not LivedI have been carrying this film around for over a quarter-century from Hanoi to Saigon to Boston and to New York. The origin of these photographs lies in the Saigon of the early 1970s where I was a war orphan. I count myself as one of the lucky ones: as part of Operation Babylift in April 1975, I was evacuated on a Pan American Airways 747 from Tan Son Nhat to San Francisco International and, after medical processing in Harmon Hall at the Presidio, to Buffalo Niagara where I was adopted in West Seneca, New York.As a child in western New York, I devoted hours to drawing, painting, and photography. For the last, my older brother had built a darkroom in our basement so I had access to everything I needed to learn the basics. As a student at Harvard College, I had the opportunity to study Vietnamese history with Hue-Tam Ho Tai and documentary photography with Chris Killip and David Goldblatt.Highly influenced by what I learned from them, I returned to Vietnam in 1993 with a manual 35mm camera, a basic tripod, and a lot of film. I spent countless days riding my gearless bicycle around Hanoi, shooting and burning images into my memory. Given that I was always seen with a tripod strapped to my back, my nickname amongst the few English-speaking foreigners was Tripod Boy.[Continued]