Postcards from the End of America (iv)

from poet Linh Dinh and the oppressed

They begin after the half-title, the very first leaf of the book where the title appears alone. They aren’t postcards.

If you cut one picture out you couldn’t write an address and note and put a stamp on it because they printed another on the back. The prints are consistent in registration, running toward red, on gloss.

A series, one photograph to be taken in after another. They are portraits.

In 15 the subjects square their shoulders around the center of a plane parallel to the shooter. 4 others look off left or right, 2 each, in an open, proud, relaxed pose and 1 glances to the side for trouble elsewhere.

So these are not voyeurism, shot from inside the bubble at those outside. Each is in its own bubble of presentation and recognition, a private meeting in a public space.

All are oriented horizontally, showing context, all of them in a built environment, 9 well inside and 11 on the street. Each portrait comes with its own number, 1 through 20, followed by the recto and verso of a leaf without number titled Captions giving location and year and a note, most often 1 sentence, and a direct quotation from each photograph’s subject.

10 of the 20 portraits map onto 7 of the 32 chapters listed in Contents, with matching city names. I expect to find more connections as I read, but the book presents the non-postcards as a section in themselves, paginated in relation to the Captions only, not at all to Contents.

What has the bookman pedant told you with these descriptive statistics? That the poet Linh Dinh is an artist.

He set out to paint for the galleries but found a studio beyond his means so he turned author, then tourist. He did post these portraits in the interweb sense, to his blog of the same name as this book.

After nearly ten years selecting after one outing after another he picked out the dozens of shots he liked best out of the hundreds he had posted. Then he selected and winnowed again and again.

I am guessing. That is how we make an art book of photos.

These not-postcards are pictures at an exhibition, a folio tipped in as we say in the used book catalogues. I did not like them when he first posted them online.

I am snooty about photos of poor people you just met. Working through them for this postcard of my own about a man I have known for a long time I have come to enjoy them and want to look at them again as I read.

Viet Nam letters have now addressed the poet Linh Dinh’s book Postcards from the End of America a total of 4 times. First on June 11, 2022, second on August 6, 2022, third on August 22, 2022. The poet Linh Dinh is the subject of 1 more on April 29, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.