BM-photo is the result of a collaborative work between Stéphanie Borcard and Nicolas Métraux, both born in 1978:
“We are a Swiss couple living for the past year in Asian hotel rooms. We like to travel slowly and to spend time in places. We are rather shy and solitary. We work on personal projects, developing calm and poetic images. Our photography is subjective. Through our recent series of photographs, we try to create a set of emotions, rather than to document a specific subject. Human interactions have always been our source of inspiration. We used to get very close to people. Now, we appreciate a certain distance.
We are collaborating with swissinfo.ch, a Swiss broadcasting agency. Currently we are back in Switzerland (Fribourg), and plan to head to China in early 2012.”
Waiting for Saigon
As the train approaches, the tiny crowd starts to move. The small train station is, for a while filled with life. We are in Vietnam. Our journey begins in Hanoi. It is late spring; the temperatures increase day-by-day crushing you. We sit on a wooden bench aboard the Reunification Express. A hard-seat-and-fan ticket to South. Promiscuity. People sleep all over the train trying to escape the heat. The air is thick. Our eyes wander there, outside on the landscape; what happened here? We were born after the war. It did not concern us, yet it was almost all we knew about Vietnam. How does this land look like today? Who are the Vietnamese? This is our travel journal. We wanted to show where we passed through, where we waited and where we got bored. The destination is not important; it is the way covered that is.
The Reunification Express was Built by the French in 1936, destroyed during the war and rebuilt in 1976, its tracks link Hanoi to Saigon. It is one of the slowest express trains in the world. We like its slow pace and its name: The Reunification Express. It evokes both: a sad past and a present peace.
