A Renewed Focus : Vo An Ninh is renowned for photos of his homeland. Now, his attention is on America.

Vo An Ninh marveled at San Diego and was impressed by Washington, D.C. But the six decades he had spent photographing the people and natural splendor of his Vietnamese homeland had not prepared him for the glitter and neon of Las Vegas.

“When I arrived in San Diego, I felt like a peasant visiting a city for the first time,” said Vo, 86. “But when I saw Las Vegas and compared it to Hanoi, I felt like I had been living in the jungle. It’s certainly the brightest city I’ve ever seen.”

Vo, whose work is little known in the United States outside the Vietnamese expatriate community, is revered in the Vietnamese art world as a nature photographer. Others who have admired his ascetic black and white photos say they are equally important as visual records of Vietnam’s turbulent modern history. He now lives with relatives in San Diego, hoping to mount an exhibit in the United States and, one day, return to Vietnam to continue his work.

“God has allowed me to live this long because I have a love and respect for nature,” he said. “A hundred years from now, I want the Vietnamese people to look at my photos and see what our country was like--beautiful, simple and unspoiled.”

With his grandson Pham Thuan translating, Vo recently told a visitor that he is still amazed to be in the United States, which he calls “an exotic and wonderful place.” After all, it was little more than two decades ago that he was taking pictures of the destruction caused by American bombers in Hanoi.

“Living in America was such a preposterous dream then,” he said. “Our countries were at war, but I never harbored resentment against the American pilots.”

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Vo developed a passion for Vietnam’s natural beauty in the 1920s, when he traveled throughout the country inspecting forests for the French colonial government. It was the French who encouraged him to concentrate on nature photography, he said.

He spent the next 63 years making photographs, using the same German-made camera he had purchased in 1928.

“Nikons are becoming very popular in Vietnam. But I am the only photographer too poor to buy one,” he joked.

Vo’s most memorable photographs were shot in isolated mountain ranges and valleys that remain almost untouched by the modern world. He reached these picturesque spots by riding a bicycle from his Hanoi home and camping alone, often for weeks at a time, waiting for just the right light to click the shutter.

“There were times when I spent three weeks alone in the solitude of the jungle. Just me and nature. There were times when I would have more film than food, and I would have to go to the villages of the mountain people to ask for something to eat,” he said.

Through the years, he developed a special empathy for the peasants, capturing their harsh lives on black and white film, relying on natural light and settings.

One particularly powerful photo, taken early on a winter morning in 1956, shows a girl walking barefoot on a paddy dike, carrying two huge straw baskets hanging from opposite ends of a stick balanced on her right shoulder. In warmer weather, the girl’s right hand would be stretched out on the pole, in front of her.

But because the morning is cold and she is coat-less, the girl tries to keep warm by tucking her hands close to her chest. The stark mood is heightened by a row of barren trees that stand behind her, reflecting on the rice paddy water in front of her.

For the most part, Vo’s photographs have languished in obscurity for more than 50 years, limited by one ideology or another--first French colonialism followed by communist dogma--to provincial displays in Vietnam and Eastern European cultural centers.

In those regions, at least, Vo enjoys the same recognition that was heaped upon Ansel Adams by the American public. Because the works of Western artists were banned in Vietnam, Vo was not familiar with Adams’ photography until recently. But, he said, he feels a special kinship with American nature photographers, particularly those who work with black and white film.

Many of the older Vietnamese who fled South Vietnam after the communist takeover in 1975 still have fond memories of his portraits.

“He has played a very important role in the history of our country and is well-known in Vietnam. From 1930 until 1954, when our country was divided, he had occasion to travel from north to south photographing every corner of Vietnam,” said Hoang Duoc Thao, editor of the Little Saigon News, based in Westminster. “He has left us with a permanent record of what Vietnam was like under the French and later under the Communists.”

Hoang, 42, said she first saw Vo’s photos when she was a schoolgirl in Saigon. “I remember the first time I saw his photos of the undeveloped countryside, the villages and the mountains. I was captivated by them.”

The government reproduced hundreds of his photos, with Vietnamese and French captions, in cheap magazines sold throughout the communist world.

Vo says he dreams of exhibiting his photos in the United States before he dies. But he was unable to bring to the United States any of the thousands of his negatives, including hundreds that remain under the control of the Vietnamese government.

Chauffeured by a former South Vietnamese army officer who spent 14 years in a communist re-education camp, Vo has traveled throughout California, photographing the state’s great cities and outdoor scenes. He has also visited the Grand Canyon.

But Vo has not developed any of the black and white film that he has shot in the United States. Like most photographers who view their work as an art form, Vo is set in his ways when it comes to reproducing his pictures.

“I am preserving the film so I can have it developed when I return to Vietnam,” he said. “I don’t have a darkroom here. I have a friend in Saigon who helps me develop and print my photographs. He is very talented and does excellent work.”

Vo now lives with a daughter, whom he had not seen since 1954, and her large extended family. Before arriving in the United States, he traveled to Paris to visit a son he had not seen since 1950, when the son left to attend school in France.

Over the years, Vo’s grandchildren had heard stories about their famous grandfather, but they had never seen him until he arrived in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, 1991. Christine Pham, herself a photographer, described the family’s reaction when they saw Vo wander into the airport lounge, lugging a battered suitcase and looking somewhat intimidated by the hustle and bustle at Los Angeles International Airport.

“We couldn’t believe that we were finally meeting my grandfather. My mom couldn’t stop crying. It was a very moving scene,” Pham said. “It was made more stressful when the customs people detained my grandfather for a while, because they couldn’t believe he traveled to the United States on a Vietnamese passport and a visa issued by the U.S. Embassy in Paris. They finally told us they would release him if we paid an entry tax of $93.”

Vo received a permanent visa a few months ago and has adjusted easily to life in the United States. He likes browsing in the shopping malls, where his wispy beard and snow-white, shoulder-length hair invite stares. He has also acquired a taste for Budweiser, which he likes to share with visitors to his daughter’s comfortable home near San Diego State University.

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Vietnam is a country born of war and molded by war. The bloodshed continued almost nonstop from 1940, when the Japanese army began a brutal occupation of French Indochina, to the 1980s, when the Vietnamese army fought a series of border skirmishes with China.

Through it all, Vo turned to nature and photography as much to insulate himself from war as to preserve a record of it. He saw it all through a camera lens, from a tranquil scene of a mountain village emerging like an apparition in a winter rain to the carpet bombing of downtown Hanoi by B-52 bombers.

During World War II, he risked death by taking clandestine photos of Japanese atrocities committed against the Vietnamese. His World War II pictures were recently published in a Japanese magazine, which also wrote a lengthy article about him.

Whenever war became unbearable, Vo would pack his photo equipment, hop a battered bicycle and pedal off to a peaceful area, where he would immerse himself in nature and photography. He never learned to drive, having lost a foot in 1937 when he was struck by a car while riding his motorbike in Hanoi.

Some, including Hoang, have criticized him mildly for choosing to stay in the communist north after the country was partitioned in 1954.

“He was not a member of the Communist Party, but the government used his photos as propaganda,” Hoang said.

Vo brushes aside the criticisms and said politics is a pitfall for artists. He said he never attempted to endorse a particular ideology with his photos. He explained that he chose to remain behind when many Vietnamese, including members of his own family, fled south because he was assured by the Hanoi government that he would be allowed to continue with his photography unimpeded.

Since his arrival in San Diego, his family has been besieged with requests from Vietnamese expatriates in the United States and Canada for copies of his photographs, which many want signed.

Recently, an elderly Vietnamese man who lives in Texas, but who has admired Vo’s art for decades, had his son drive him to San Diego so he could meet the photographer. An 80-year-old Vietnamese woman living in France but who was photographed by Vo 56 years ago in Vietnam also contacted him with a request for a copy of the photograph.

In 1960, he took what turned out to be one of his most famous photographs. While traveling through Ha Dong, a village near Hanoi, Vo saw an attractive peasant girl standing near a pile of hay. He asked her to pose, and, while positioning herself, the young woman fell backward, landing atop the hay.

Vo immediately saw an opportunity for a shot that was risque by the communist moral standards of the time. Nevertheless, the woman agreed to a seductive pose, lying fully clothed on the hay, with a come-hither look and piece of straw held gingerly between her teeth.

The photograph showed a sensuous and mysterious woman who became the North Vietnamese army’s Betty Grable. The picture was reproduced countless times and carried in the wallets of North Vietnamese army soldiers when they marched south to fight the South Vietnamese and the Americans.

“After I took that picture,” Vo said with a hearty chuckle, “a great number of officers asked me for copies.”