Village, Mekong River Delta, South Vietnam / A Saigon Street

From the Getty Museum record

> From June 1958 until February 1959 Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Schuster Taylor traveled in Asia, returning by way of Russia, Germany, and England. The reason for this extensive trip was his assignment from the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (later the Agency for International Development) to investigate the problems of community development and land tenure in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Pakistan. Taylor's background in the history and economics of agricultural societies made him a popular consultant in the post-World War II era. In the 1950s and 1960s he made frequent journeys to trouble spots, including Cuba, Panama, and Haiti, for public and private organizations. The agency would send him back to Vietnam twice in the 1960s, resulting in several reports, one of which, *Communist Strategy and Tactics of Employing Peasant Dissatisfaction over Conditions of Land Tenure for Revolutionary Ends in Vietnam,* was not released until the summer of 1970. > > For health reasons, Lange was not able to accompany Taylor on all his trips, but she was with him in the fall of 1958 and wrote long letters back to their children reporting on his hard work and her impressions of each new country. They stayed in Vietnam for three weeks in a French colonial hotel, the Majestic. Their activities ranged from dinner with the American ambassador to forays into the jungle with government guides. They also had some time for strolling in Saigon's streets and walking along its river, which she described in an aside in an October letter: "Such a fascinating river—to watch its flow and the movement of sampans, and the play of the oars, and the rhythm of the oarsmen is like listening to music; only it's visual." > > Although Lang could not record the café music that drifted through the rain in this urban scene (loudspeakers were apparently common), she did compose a picture that reflects the graceful movements of a young man who seems to be responding to the sounds of his surroundings. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 82. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.