This post is also available in: French

”December 1972 […]. We are visiting a refugee camp on a former US military base. On the door of a hut made of odds and ends, there’s a clumsy graffiti: Forget ME Not. […] 45 years later […], I told myself that it were time for me to write ”Forget ME Not” somewhere.

Then I plunged into my contact sheets, happy to revive my memories scrolling the strips of negatives, amazed to discover some nuggets which had not caught my attention during the editing of 1972.” In Vietnam, Forget Me Not, Abbas offers us a new vision of the documentary he produced in Vietnam from 1972 to 1975. Deeply marked by this country, he confronts his memories with this new nation open to capitalism which he revisited in 2008. From the anti-war protests in Miami to his return to the country, this book contains war photographs but also images of the cities that the photographer has travelled across. Beyond historical and political documentary, Abbas tells about his everyday life as a photographer and about the country that touched him so much.

Iranian living in Paris, Abbas has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1981. In the 1970’s, as a photojournalist, he covered many countries in conflict including Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, Chile and South Africa under apartheid. From 1978 to 1980, he closely followed the Islamic revolution in Iran. From 1987 to 1994, he witnessed the resurgence of Islam throughout the world and published Allah O Akbar – Travels in militant Islam at Phaidon in 1994 and Travel in Christendom at Éditions de La Martinière in 2000. Abbas’s growing interest in religion prompted him to start working on animist rituals around the world in 2000. This project was interrupted in 2001 by the attacks of the 11th September. Sad news then dragged him back onto the paths of radical Islam and led to the publication of the book On behalf of whom? at Éditions du Pacifique in 2009. Since 2007, he has been trying to understand who the Buddhists of today are.