Between Frames

This exhibition presents a photographic archive assembled by Philippe Trinh from images capturing daily life, made by U.S. servicemen in Vietnam during the war using their own personal cameras.

Most photographs of Vietnam record events. These record a world as it was lived — glimpses of days the men would leave behind, many never returning to the places they documented, and moments preserved from a war in which so many never returned.

Taken during pauses in battle, the images linger on ordinary time — haircuts under tin roofs, music played for homesick young men, afternoons at the beach, moments of wandering curiosity, soldiers briefly becoming tourists in an unfamiliar world, and the bonds formed between them.

The camera returns repeatedly to those who remained — the women beside them, orphaned children, and families formed in the margins of conflict. Instead of violence, the images record the psychology of war: boredom, longing, companionship, and the fragile normalcy constructed to endure uncertainty.

For the men who captured them, these photographs were temporary observations. For others, they became something else.

Philippe’s parents come from the same streets pictured here. His father left Vietnam the day before the fall of Saigon, and both parents arrived in the United States among the first wave of refugees. Like many who fled, they carried almost no photographs with them. Their past survived as memory without image.

Seen decades later, the photographs move in two directions at once. What was once a soldier’s casual record of a foreign country becomes a fragment of a home a family lost. Strangers unknowingly preserved daily life — streets, gestures, and relationships — that exile erased and history rarely kept.

Rather than documenting how the war was fought, the collection traces how people lived beside it.

They exist in the space between witness and memory, between leaving and losing — between frames.

Recovered from hudreds of saved negative frames and film strips shot by U.S. servicemen in Vietnam.

The images don’t show combat — instead they document an unseen glimpse of daily life: passing time, beaches, music, family, and the civilians around them. It’s the war seen from within, rather than reported on.

My parents fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon and left without photographs, so these frames unexpectedly preserve fragments of the world they lost. The show brings those perspectives together decades later.

The photographs in Between Frames originate as original black-and-white negatives made by U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. Most have never been printed. For decades, they remained as undeveloped fragments of daily life — rare records of waiting, companionship, and routine beyond the battlefield.

Rather than digitizing the archive, the negatives were returned to the darkroom.

Each image is hand-printed as a silver gelatin fiber print on reclaimed vintage photographic paper from the same era as the film itself. The materials carry their own history — preserved, unused, and reintroduced into the present.

The prints are produced on a vintage Leitz Focomat from the estate of Milt Hinton.

Light passes through the original negative and onto silver-coated fiber paper, allowing each photograph to emerge through the same chemical process that first defined it. These works are not reproductions but continuations — images brought into view for the first time.

Together, they preserve fragments of a Vietnam rarely pictured in official histories: life lived beside war, in the moments between frames.