I spent about a half hour photographing street traffic from the fourth floor balcony of our hotel overlooking the central square of this town near the Vietnam/Cambodia border. Of all the images I made from that balcony, this one was the most memorable. He came out of the shadow of the tree like a phantom figure from the past, wearing a costume common in rural Vietnam fifty or 100 years ago. Yet there he was, balancing his wares on a single pole, abstracted by his conical hat, his shadow extending from his body like a ghost from another time. This image was a perfect candidate for black and white, an abstracting force that made the image less real, more ghostly and far more universally symbolic of a Vietnam that no longer exists.