Description
It is an open-air drugstore like thousands across Vietnam, and yet this one verges on architecture. Clusters of sachets fall from the ceiling in tight curtains, toothbrushes line up in regiments, every centimetre is occupied, ordered, thought through. In the midst of this dizzying accumulation, the shopkeeper is on the phone — and she is what the eye finally finds, like the heart of a labyrinth. Black and white strips the scene of its advertising motley and keeps only the substance: a teeming field of textures in which the human figure reclaims its central place. It is also a portrait of Vietnamese commerce, an economy of detail pushed to its extreme, where abundance fits within three square metres.
