Description
One must gain altitude to understand this image, made by drone above the lotus ponds of Muong, in Vietnam. At ground level, these are merely ponds covered with leaves and walkways on stilts; seen from above, these paths become a deliberate drawing — the petals of an immense lotus flower, a heart of curving lines, an unfolded fan. The entire landscape becomes pattern: the dykes cut the water into rectilinear plots, the wooded hills close off the corners of the image, a few village roofs surface at the edges. Black and white erases the greens and pinks of the flowering to keep only the structure, this graphic interplay between the geometry of men and the orderly profusion of the plants. What remains is an almost calligraphic form, laid upon the water, where the cultivation of the lotus literally becomes its own emblem.
