Ibarionex Perello is known as a street photographer. Fair enough. But the workshop he leads in Hanoi isn't really a street photography workshop — and the difference is worth understanding.

Midweek, we leave the city.

Three hours south, the rice fields give way to limestone peaks rising straight out of the water. You ride through cave passages in a narrow wooden boat, rowed in silence by a guide who steers with her feet. You climb 500 stone steps to a summit where the valley spreads out in every direction.

Then we drive back to Hanoi, and you see the city differently.

It's 2 a.m. and the bridge is already moving. Not traffic — everything. Baskets, bodies, motorbikes, boxes of dragonfruit piled so high you can't see the riders beneath them. Long Biên wholesale market runs on a schedule that has nothing to do with the sun, and if you walk in here for the first time with a camera, you will almost certainly freeze.

Most photographers pick up a camera and aim it at things that interest them. Ibarionex Perello teaches something harder — to see the world before you start reacting to it. A profile of the photographer, educator, and podcast host leading X-Pedition Hanoi 2026.

Larry Gassan showed up to his first X-Peditions workshop in Havana in 2018, not entirely sure he belonged in the room with better photographers. Seven trips later — two to Cuba, five to Hanoi — he's a different person behind the camera. We sat down with him on WhatsApp to find out what happened in between.

AI can generate a convincing image of Hanoi's streets — but it can't put you on a balcony in the Old Quarter, savoring bún chả as the city moves below you. Since 2019, Joe Newman has been organizing photography workshops in Vietnam for one simple reason: some experiences you have to be there for.