The Quiet Life

All the streets of Saigon are lined with trees. Not just in quiet laneways like this one, but along heavy traffic throughways — towering, majestic trees rise up from beneath heavy slabs of concrete otherwise thick enough to bury civilizations, including this one. Everybody knows it. Not a single person in this city takes any of them for granted. Not one person, and not one tree. 

This elderly woman is sitting in the entryway to the Kowloon City Market. Originally built in the 1930s and rebuilt in the 80s, it shares the same building design as the other seventy-odd government-run markets in the city: two floors of independent food vendors and an open concept third floor of cooked food stalls that serve everyday meals at affordable prices. It’s where this woman would have just had lunch as she probably does on the days she shops here, sharing a table with old friends who all do the same.

She’s in her eighties now. For her and elders like her, no matter where in the city they have lived, they’ve all been coming to food markets like this one. What were once uneventful daily errands have now become coveted opportunities for a feast of friends. Unbeknownst to the city’s youth, these markets will forever be the quintessential Hong Kong that just keeps getting better.

These city streets in the oldest neighbourhoods of Phnom Penh are tightly packed with four and five story walk-up apartment buildings. They’re decades old and crumbling but still home to a large population of the city’s less fortunate who are often excluded from the progress of life around them.

Though the buildings may be in decay, the communities they are home to have remained vibrant, hidden within a labyrinth of narrow and self-sufficient laneways that have kept their existence a secret and their lives safe from nowhere else to go.

The small Azerbaijani city of Quba rests comfortably to the east of the Caucasus mountains, right where they begin to unwind into the quiet shoreline of the Caspian sea.

Within the city of Quba itself, and resting just as comfortably, this man is enjoying his own quiet moment of peace. Unwinding like the mountains around him. Taking everything in and nothing for granted.

On the highway into and out of the small town of Lin this man sells his fall harvest of onions, potatoes, and his home-made hot pickled peppers preserved in small, plastic water bottles. Throughout the day he waits down the road, relaxing in the grass and under the shade trees. But whenever someone begins to approach he quickly makes his way back to his market stand, buttons his jacket and stands up straight and proper behind his goods — the perfect gentleman waiting to greet you.

The quiet life still exists here in Bangladesh, and you don’t have to go far outside the major cities to find it. While the country has been booming with development for the past decade, most of the small villages and rural districts have been left virtually untouched. The village of Shulpur is one of them, resting comfortably on the other side of the Rupsa River just outside the city of Khulna.

But change is coming. For better or for worse and probably for both. Change is coming and it will come here. When it does, for the people who regularly visit this take-a-load-off-your-feet-and-stay-a-while tea stand, it will probably break their hearts.

In the small Cambodian city of Kracheh, on the very outskirts of town, these young children are all growing up together. They live right here in this house and the neighbouring homes around it, overlooking the river and farmlands where they play at the end of the day and where they’ll will work when they get older. Unless something unusual happens in their lives or to this place, they will probably never leave here. With sunsets like this it’s not a given they’ll ever want to, but the real question is, what would they do if the choice was theirs?

An elderly Armenian woman walks slowly and alone through this grand and empty Soviet-era bus station―an eerily emblematic scene of modern-day Armenia.

Today, 30 years after the demise of the USSR, the modernist Soviet-era architecture still defines the landscapes of most Armenian cities―geometric, utilitarian structures that stand like monuments to the populations meant to inhabit them.

But after 70 years of Soviet rule following the Armenian genocide of World War 1, there are now fewer than 3 million Armenians living in their homeland, over a million of whom live in the nation’s capital, Yerevan. In other cities and towns throughout the country, like the city of Vanadzor where this photograph is taken, the population is half of what it was in 1976 when the construction of this bus station was completed.

Today there are over 11 million Armenians living world-wide. Less than a quarter of them live inside their homeland.