Fencing and traps, Cambodia by Sandy LeBrun-Evans

Sandy LeBrun-Evans at Multiple Exposures Gallery by Louis Jacobson

Sandy LeBrun-Evans has been photographing since the late 1980s and early 1990s, initially using black-and-white and infrared film, and more recently digital equipment. During her career, she’s taken photos in Cuba, in ghost towns in the Western U.S., in the coal mining region of West Virginia, and most recently, at a working ranch in Wyoming. Last year, a friend asked her to join her on a visit to southeast Asia. “It was not a photography tour, so I had to look for opportunities as they arose and be ready to shoot when I found myself in the right place at the right time,” LeBrun-Evans tells City Paper. She photographed the colorful but fragile “floating” houses of Tonlè Sap Lake in Cambodia as well as in the Mekong River delta. But her most impressive images are the moody, misty seascapes from an overnight cruise to Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. “I had to quickly jump on opportunities when I saw them and figure out a way to photograph around crowds of people,” she says. If there’s a common thread between these and her earlier works, LeBrun-Evans says, it’s fragility, both environmental and social. “An unspoken theme is the need to protect natural resources while also preserving cultural heritage,” she says. Sandy LeBrun-Evans’s Waters of SE Asia runs through April 23 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Suite 312, Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson