Asian Waters

Books

Where a place needs more room than a film gives it

A film holds a place for ten minutes. Some of these water systems have more in them than that — photographs that never entered a cut, and reasoning that belongs on a page rather than in narration. The books take those.

Cover of The Long Threshold: an aerial view of aquaculture ponds on the Hue lagoon, mountains behind.

The Long Threshold

The Hue lagoons, central Vietnam

A lagoon is neither a lake nor the sea. Tam Giang–Cau Hai, on the coast of Thua Thien Hue province in central Vietnam, is a chain of shallow basins held apart from the ocean by a ribbon of sand and joined to it through a very small number of narrow mouths. Almost everything about the system follows from those openings.

The book reads the lagoon through seven states of its water, from the most still to the most violent, and then the ground: Still, Held, Drifting, Flooded, Hidden, Breaking, Ashore. Bamboo fish traps set across open water. Ponds drawn where the lagoon, or rice, once was. The autumn floods that erase the edges of the plain. Rain passing slowly beneath the dunes. The barrier beach. Households that fish, farm ponds and trade in the course of one year.

A closing essay, Drawing Lines on Water, follows the decade after an FAO project on the lagoon. An index of photographs and a map of the system complete the book.

Texts by Massimo Sarti · Photographs by Andrea Pistolesi · PadPlaces

The same ground as the film The Long Threshold, at book length.

Where to find it

The ebook is fixed-layout: each screen shows one printed spread. Best read on iPad in landscape.