Unrau, Don. The Revolutionary Moment by Don Unrau. Signed.

Stray Dog Press, 2013. Portraits of Viet Cong in Vietnam by Don Unrau, a Vietnam War veteran who served in the U.S. armed forces who went back to Vietnam to photograph his former enemies. Cloth, issued in a first edition of 250 hardcover copies without dust jacket. SIGNED. 28 black-and-white photos. As new.  Summary:

The Revolutionary Moment: Portraits of Viet Cong (2013) is an intimate, limited-edition photographic monograph conceived, captured, and published by American artist and Vietnam War veteran Don Unrau. Published by Stray Dog Press in a scarce print run of only 250 signed clothbound copies, the book compiles over thirty black-and-white portraits.

The volume marks a profound personal and creative milestone for Unrau, a former U.S. Army combat medic who spent decades return-traveling to Vietnam to document its peacetime recovery and confront his own wartime trauma.

Key Themes and Visual Style

• Humanizing the Former Enemy: The emotional core of the monograph rests on Unrau’s subversion of historical memory. Rather than depicting the National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong) as an abstract, hostile entity, Unrau photographs them as aging veterans, grandparents, and ordinary citizens, demanding a radical re-evaluation of empathy.

• The Geography of Resistance: The portraits were captured over a period of extensive travel through the Quang Ngai Province, a region historically known for its fierce, generational resistance against foreign occupation—first under French colonial forces, and later during the Vietnam War. Unrau specifically traversed rural communes surrounding the My Lai area, the site of the infamous 1968 American military massacre.

• Candid Confrontation and Empathy: Shot using high-quality black-and-white film and printed with rich carbon pigments, the visual style relies heavily on a straightforward, unembellished portraiture technique. The subjects stand or sit, looking directly into Unrau's lens, bridging the gap between a former American soldier and his past adversaries.

• The Invisible Weight of Survival: In a brief preface, Unrau describes his artistic intent: he sought to move past mere physical documentation to instead perceive the "unexpressed heaviness of war" that lingers in the expressions, postures, and deeply lined faces of the survivors.

Significance

The Revolutionary Moment acts as a vital, reconciliation-focused counterpoint to Unrau’s early career work, which focused entirely on the psychological burdens of American veterans. By stepping behind the lens to document the very people he once fought against, Unrau utilizes portraiture as a cross-cultural bridge, transforming a site of shared historical tragedy into a quiet study of aging, resilience, and mutual recognition.