Across a table, listening is a zero-sum game. I stare straight into someone’s eyes—blue, brown, speckled with green—but their words turn to static in my ears. I see the freckles spotting their cheeks but not the question I was asked, the loose thread around their shirt collar but not the details of their story. By the time they finish talking, I haven’t registered anything they’ve said, just the way their hands rest on the table between us and the tone of their voice when they ask if I was listening.

A camera between us changes the math. It turns the noise into language I can actually understand.

As a photojournalist, you must train your eyes and ears to react in tandem. A second too late, and you’ve missed the moment; the climax has come and gone, and you’re stuck making a story of the epilogue. The viewfinder became my funnel. It took the energy in a room and channeled it into something clear, forcing me to sense everything and categorize it in real time. In the beginning this felt like liberation—finally, I could hear and see at once, the words matched up with the pictures.

But a funnel is not a filter. It does not sift out the weight.

Some journalists can tune it out. They put a wall between themselves and their subjects, hang their press badge on the hook and close the door until tomorrow. I could never find that balance. I swallowed every story whole. After several years, there just wasn’t any more space.

So I left. And for a while it seemed like the worst mistake I’d ever made; the phantom limb of my career ached at my side. I reached out for another life to cling onto, something distant and unfamiliar and new. My fingertips found Hanoi.

I had visited briefly years before, but the imprint remained fresh in my mind. It was a different kind of noise; chaos you could reach out and touch, motorbikes and night markets and streetstalls. Friends spoke of teaching abroad—a temporary reset, a clean break from the America I was so desperate to leave—and I figured in a year I could catch my breath, figure out what came next.

But sitting at the table all the way across the world, voices became static once again. The eyes were new colors, the hands in different places, but I remained the same, and the words dissolved with the ice in my drink.

It was then that the camera came back out. It was a reflex, I suppose, a means to anchor myself in the room again. I realized then what it truly was to me: the only tool that allowed me to listen, to stay, to speak back into the world and not lose my place in it.

It is not just a translator. It is my voice.

A Note on What’s to Come

If you made it this far, thank you for reading.

This space is where I’ll be sharing photo essays, personal observations, and visual notes on navigating life, art, and sensory processing from Hanoi—exploring what it means to slow down, look closely, and listen to a loud world.

If that resonates, I’d love for you to subscribe and follow along.

All the love,

Lizzie.

Photos and words by Lizzie Heintz.

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