Between Frames

Recovered from thousands of found and preserved negatives, photographs, and film strips taken by U.S. servicemen in Vietnam.

The photographs don’t depict combat. Instead, they trace the overlooked rhythms of daily life: passing time, fleeting connections, and the civilians who moved alongside them. What emerges is a view of the war from within.

My parents fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon and left without photographs, so these frames unexpectedly preserve fragments of the world they lost.

Decades later, the work brings these parallel histories into conversation—where one person’s passing moment becomes another family’s missing memory.

Viewed together, these images reflect the conditions in which they were made. Some of these amateur photographs are imperfect—while others feel more deliberate.

They show a side of war that is rarely seen. Not the conflict itself, but everything surrounding it—how time passed, how unfamiliar places were experienced, and what stood out enough to be remembered.

Each photograph is a fragment—a single frame pulled from a much larger experience. What they show is incomplete.

For me, these images exist alongside another timeline.

There is the Vietnam I know today—what I’ve walked through myself. A country that feels alive, evolving, layered with new energy. And then there is the Vietnam my parents carry with them. The one shaped by memory, by stories told over meals, by moments that were never photographed.

These photographs, images and video sit somewhere in between.

They are not my family’s images, but they move through the same time and the same landscape. They begin to fill in the space between what was lived and what was passed down. They offer glimpses into a world that shaped a generation before me—one that my family came out of, and one I am still trying to understand.

For many of us, that connection is layered. We return as visitors, trying to piece together something that was never fully ours to begin with. But through fragments like these—through what others saw, and chose to remember—we get closer to that past.

And in that space between images and memory, between their experience and ours, a connection begins to take form.

This exhibition presents a photographic archive assembled by Philippe Trinh from images of daily life, captured by U.S. servicemen in Vietnam using their own personal cameras.

Most photographs associated with the Vietnam War center on conflict. This collection turns away from that perspective, focusing instead on the everyday moments these men chose to record. Many never returned to the places they photographed, and many never returned home.

The images in this exhibition were made outside official documentation—taken casually, often without technical training, by individuals navigating an unfamiliar environment. As a result, the archive resists polish. Some frames are soft, out of focus, maybe slightly over exposed, yet more importantly they carry an immediacy that feels unfiltered and direct.

Rather than offering a complete account, the photographs reflect individual attention—what caught the eye, what felt worth keeping, what might be sent back to someone far away. Scenes of routine surface again and again: improvised haircuts, music shared between soldiers, stretches of idle time, brief encounters with new landscapes, and the shifting rhythm between tension and release. Most often, the camera settles on one another—friends, companions, and the relationships that formed within uncertainty.

The lens also turns toward the surrounding world—local civilians, workers, families, and children—figures encountered in passing or through daily proximity. These moments do not attempt to explain the war. Instead, they reveal how life continued alongside it.

What emerges is not a record of events, but of presence—of how it felt to exist within that time. The images trace states of waiting, closeness, curiosity, and dislocation, revealing the emotional texture that official histories often leave behind.

For the men who made them, these photographs were immediate and personal. Over time, they have taken on a different weight.

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 began as a soldier’s passing record becomes, in another context, a visual trace of a place that was lost. Through these images, fragments of everyday life—streets, gestures, fleeting interactions—persist beyond displacement.

Rather than documenting how the war was fought, the collection considers how people lived within its edges.

They exist in the space between witness and memory, between departure and absence—between frames.

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.