Home Work - Domestic labour in the suburbs and villages in and around Hanoi, Vietnam

Home Work looks at Vietnam’s ‘craft’ villages. These specialise in a single product or activity, anything from palm leaf hats to incense sticks, or from noodle making to snake-catching. Some of these ‘craft’ villages date back hundreds of years, whilst others are a more recent response to enable rural farmers to earn much needed extra income.

I spent two six month periods in Vietnam and visited many of these villages. The traditional village house is typically single storey and consists of three rooms. The large central room is a multi-purpose living, sleeping and working area and it is in this room where many of my images are taken, the mix of work and everyday objects fascinated me visually. Interspersed with images from daily life in the rice fields and in the villages, these photographs depict ‘working from home’ in an unromanticised sense, where their subjects, mostly women, balance childcare with the routine work necessary for survival.

Limited edition of 1000 £19.99 (signed)

Published by Dewi Lewis, with support from Arts Council England, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-904587-90-3

Quarter-bound hardback
245 x 173mm
104 pages
42 colour photographs
with essays by Jane Fletcher and Michael DiGregorio
Design by James Corazzo

To purchase Home Work please contact Tessa directly on info@tessabunney.co.uk

BIO

For over 30 years, Tessa Bunney has photographed rural life, working closely with individuals and communities to investigate how the landscape is shaped by humans. From hill farmers near her home in North Yorkshire to Icelandic puffin hunters, from Romanian nomadic shepherds to Lincolnshire flower farmers her projects reveal the fascinating intricacies of the dependencies between people, work and the land.

Recent work includes ‘Made out of Orchards’ which was commissioned, published and exhibited by the Martin Parr Foundation and ‘Going to the Sand’, an ongoing personal project collaborating with Morecambe Bay fishermen which was published by Another Place Press in 2023.

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www.tessabunney.co.uk