Ha Dao is a photographer and artist based in Hanoi. While rooted in documentary photography, her recent work reflects a shift toward questioning the medium itself—its boundaries, failures and possibilities. She is also the managing editor of Matca, an independent platform in Vietnam that supports critical conversations around photography through exhibitions, writing, and community-driven initiatives.
Which three books would you recommend?
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s HouseAudre Lorde
Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1979) has had a lasting impact on how I see myself and my work. In this compact collection of essays, Lorde confronts with sharp precision the exclusion of marginalized voices within feminist discourse in the US at the time, and calls for a deeper analysis of intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality. Her words, though penned decades earlier, helped me make sense of my own positioning today: a lesbian in the testosterone-driven field of photography, someone from the working class navigating an art world that is hush-hush around money, and a person of color quietly expected to speak on war or decolonization to be legible to international (read: white) institutions. Yet even as these identity markers shape how one is seen and received, Lorde’s work reminds us to remain alert—because identity politics, too, can be co-opted and weaponized in our increasingly polarized world.
To anyone who has ever felt that their difference is seen as a disadvantage, this book offers both a critique and a reminder: our differences should be acknowledged and made visible, not smoothed over in the name of unity. And real change demands more than being offered a seat at the table; it calls for rethinking how the table is built.
Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam Thy Phu
Though only recently published, Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam (2021) by Thy Phu already feels like a canonical text. Moving beyond dominant Western (mainly American) frameworks, Phu maps a broader and more nuanced photographic history of what is commonly known as the Vietnam War. What stayed with me most is how she follows the logic of the practitioners rather than imposing pre-existing theoretical frameworks to explain their practice. Notably, the book repositions images by revolutionary photojournalists as complex visual artefacts shaped by distinct material realities and ideological commitments, rather than dismissing them as mere instruments of the state. At the same time, it gives rare attention to South Vietnamese photography, whose artistic contributions have largely been erased from the official narrative and now surface only in fragments as “orphaned” photo albums found in vintage stores across Saigon. The book helps illuminate the contested legacy of my own medium and how deeply socialist imagery continues to inform visual culture in Vietnam today.
I recommend this to anyone interested in the social lives of photographs, specifically their entanglements with historical events and everyday life.
The Flame Leonard Cohen
The Flame (2018), the final work by the revered musician Leonard Cohen, which includes lyrics and poems that he never set to music. The book was actually gifted to me on my 23rd birthday by Linh Pham, Matca’s co-founder.
I’m not sure joy is the right word. Cohen’s writing, much like his songs, often leans toward the morose, touching on heavy themes of faith, love, and mortality. But there’s something freeing and even comforting in the raw honesty of someone facing the inevitable, who now has no choice but to accept their own defeat and vanity. Sometimes I open it like an oracle. For example, today’s page reads: “Listen to the hummingbird / Whose wings you cannot see / Listen to the hummingbird / Don't listen to me.”
What is your favourite bookstore or library?
In Vietnam, books can be seen as potentially dangerous goods, subject to removal at customs. So the presence of books carries a weight that shouldn’t be taken for granted. I’m obviously biased to say I’m proud of Matca’s growing collection of nearly 700 books on photography, handpicked and donated by friends over the years. Still, we’re just one of many independent initiatives in Vietnam that are quietly working to make images, words, and ideas more accessible to the public.