Mark F. Erickson

Mark F. Erickson (Đỗ Văn Hùng) is the author of the photobook Other Streets: Scenes from a Life in Vietnam not Lived.

Mark's photobook has been exhibited at the L.A. Center of Photography, the Davis Orton Gallery, and the Griffin Museum of Photography. He has been profiled in The Photobook Journal, diaCRITICS: the arts & culture of the Vietnamese and SE Asian diaspora, and the Worksleeve podcast.

Mark was born in Saigon in 1972, evacuated as part of Operation Babylift in April 1975, and adopted by an American family in western New York. At Harvard College, he studied documentary photography with Chris Killip (United Kingdom) and David Goldblatt (South Africa) before returning to Vietnam in 1993. He currently works in New York City.

“OTHER STREETS is a marvelously evocative depiction of everyday life in Vietnam, which is made all the more poignant on learning Mark was adopted from Vietnam and brought to the USA as a three year old child.”

—Chris Killip, author of In Flagrante, Seacoal, and Isle of Man; recipient of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award; and subject of solo exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, Le Bal, Tate Britain, Museo Reina Sofia, and The J. Paul Getty Museum

"Other Streets...offers an incredible look at daily life in post-war Vietnam. The photos...portray the quiet mundanities that are so often ignored in depictions of Vietnam. They are beautiful to witness, yet poignant in the eyes of this fellow refugee."

--Thanhha Lai, author of Inside Out & Back Again, Listen, Slowly and Butterfly Yellow; recipient of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Newbury Honor

"I couldn’t help but notice that many of the photographs are of boys, or young men, at play or at work. Knowing his own story could have turned on a dime at the time of his adoption to the U.S., I think of Erickson imagining how his own life could have turned out if someone in his family or neighborhood had made the fateful decision to keep him in Vietnam and raise him to be one of the very men he had photographed 20 years later as an American citizen."

--Kev Minh Allen, author of Sleep Is No Comfort: Essays and Go In Clean, Come Out Dirty: Poems

*2019 Photobook Awards - Official Selection, the L.A. Center of Photography

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*10th Annual Photobook Show - Official Selection, the Davis Orton Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography

In 1972, I was born Đỗ Văn Hùng in Saigon. In April 1975, as part of Operation Babylift, I was evacuated on a Pan American Airways 747, adopted in western New York, and renamed Mark F. Erickson. Growing up, I learned about Vietnam as an American, hearing and absorbing only the stories America was telling itself about the war.

As a student at Harvard College, I made my first Vietnamese-American friends, studied Vietnamese history from a Vietnamese perspective with Hue-Tam Ho Tai, and learned documentary photography with Chris Killip and David Goldblatt. From Killip and Goldblatt, I learned how powerful photo essays undermined the stories the English (In Flagrante), the South Africans (In Boksburg), and the Americans (Robert Frank’s The Americans) told themselves.

Thus, in 1993, I returned to Vietnam with my manual 35mm film camera to subvert the version of my birth country that I myself had absorbed from Hollywood films. Through these images of ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places, I had a glimpse into a life I never had the opportunity to live. And twenty-five years later, it is also a glimpse into a Vietnam—now transformed by rapid economic growth—that no longer exists.