Description
In 968, at the end of the war of the twelve warlords, Đinh Bộ Lĩnh proclaimed himself emperor of Đại Cồ Việt and settled his court at Hoa Lư, in a valley enclosed by limestone ridges like a rampart. The Early Lê dynasty reigned there in turn. In 1010, Lý Thái Tổ judged those reigns too short-lived, preferred the open plain of Đại La to the closed valley, and founded Thăng Long there, the “ascending dragon”, today’s Hanoi. What remains at Hoa Lư are the temples raised to the first kings on the site of their palaces, rivers that once served as roads, and this tower karst, chiselled by water over millions of years and, at times, turned by the sea into an archipelago. UNESCO inscribed it in 2014 as the Trang An Landscape Complex, on two counts: for its beauty, and for the thirty thousand years of human presence it preserves.
Taken at water level, the photograph reduces this landscape to three values. Above, a white sky, without cloud or detail, left as it is; in the middle, the peaks in successive silhouettes, paler as they recede; below, the river, the only surface to receive the light and return it as silver shivers. On the right, a palm tree leans its black mass over the current; near the bank, a few poles planted in the water say, quietly, that people are here. One thinks of East Asian landscape painting, where the emptiness of the paper weighs as much as the ink: here too, it is the white that gives the blacks their weight.
In Vietnamese, a single word, nước, means both water and country. The Water series follows places where water does not merely reflect the landscape: it founds it.
