Description
In this Hanoi embroidery workshop, each worker sits at a traditional frame: two wooden rollers that stretch the silk, sheathed in red fabric, on which rest skeins of orange, blue and grey, ready for use. In the foreground, an embroiderer in a chequered shirt is recreating a sunset sky; the reference image rests on the frame, and the needle advances, stitch after stitch, towards that sheet of orange already half born. Her neighbour, further along, draws a threaded needle above a motif in progress. This photograph is one of the few in the series to retain its colour — a choice that imposed itself: to remove it would have been to take from the embroiderers their alphabet. What remains is a portrait of patience, in which hours of minute gestures end up making a landscape, just as the photograph fixes its own in an instant.
