Michael Parfitt documents Vietnam’s Hmong and Dao communities as they quietly adapt tradition to survive tourism, urbanisation and vanishing land.
Vietnam’s ethnic minorities have endured colonialism, war, and displacement. Now they face a quieter erasure, as cities expand and traditions fade.
Since August 2025, I’ve been documenting Hmong, Dao, and other Indigenous communities across northern Vietnam, where daily life balances between the old and the inevitable. These images tell of resilience and loss and of cultures adapting to survive on their own terms.
The dramatic expansion of tourism and urbanisation across Northern Vietnam necessitates radical geographical re-engineering. This infrastructure investment, including major access roads, dams, and land conversion, generates severe land-use conflict, placing acute pressure on the environmental integrity of the valleys and reducing the arable land available to traditional farming communities.
The community’s ability to sustain its culture relies on continuous adaptation. Family life centres on the passing of generational knowledge, while economic survival demands an engagement with the outside world. Traditional commerce, particularly the critical local markets, acts as the primary interface where ancestral customs negotiate the new realities of regional trade and external tourism.
Michael Parfitt is an Australian photojournalist whose humanity-focused work stretches across the globe. He continually seeks counterpoints as he travels, capturing the fundamental moments when we connect through work, food, and family.
In Sharon Eilon’s Cuba, dignity persists in ration lines and decaying doorways, even as a generation disappears.
Sharon Eilon captures the everyday rhythms of Myanmar’s Buddhist monastic community, in robes, ritual, and quiet devotion.
Michael Wriston’s street portraiture is all about asking strangers to stop, be seen, and briefly belong to each other’s day.
