On view at CPW in Kingston, New York, the debut exhibition Sống by the award-winning poet and novelist Ocean Vuong is a collection of photographs spanning several years and arriving in the present through portraits of his younger brother. Sống—meaning “to live” in Vietnamese and evoking in English William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience—narrates care and the struggle to stay afloat amid grief following his mother’s death. Vuong’s personal story intersects with the historical, intergenerational grief of the diaspora that followed the Vietnamese Resistance War Against America.
A practice he has long cherished, at first to help friends get free skateboards and gear, or to earn some money at punk concerts, photography became, through his digital camera, a way to capture his family in unguarded moments. It is a method of documenting the present that, as he says, remains open to mistakes, to the unpredictable, generous and inventive precisely because of those mistakes.
An exercise in staying present, confronting vulnerability, and resisting immobile, binary perspectives, Vuong’s photography depicts moments of everyday life within his immigrant working-class environment, elevating the mundane into a realm where grief and memory can be faced, and where attention is paid to everything (and everyone) that tends to be forgotten, dismissed as unimportant, or discarded.
I’d like to start asking you, how did your desire to photograph begin? When you write, you seem to work through images. So when you photograph, is there still a connection to writing or is the process more immediate, more instinctive?
That’s a lovely question. I think both. Photography is a very descriptive medium. The camera captures, the photograph describes. So there are two different objects at work.
I think writing for me is a matter of description. It’s putting objects next to each other so that they have resonance. There’s always a connection there. The major difference in composition is that writing is deeply considered and it’s full of doubt and placement. A sentence arrives quite slowly, a bit cooked, a bit considered. Whereas the photograph can be very serendipitous. A lot of luck can happen in photography and in ways that I think Susan Sontag said it best, there’s no luck in writing. No one writes a good sentence by accident. I like that photography is more forgiving of error and imperfection.
Phuong and Mom (2009)© Ocean Vuong
Maybe you cannot control photography, or you can control it less. And I see a connection with your work which reveals a deep vulnerability. Photography has a direct, almost unguarded language. So my second question is how do you navigate this different form of vulnerability and does it expose something that writing cannot? Or does it simply reveal it in another way?