Ocean Vuong Is a Legitimately Good Photographer

Art Review

One would possibly assume that his images is the nepo child of his writing, however that is genuinely a terrific present.

KINGSTON, NY — Being actually, actually good at one thing is a double-edged sword: People will eternally decide the whole lot you do by the usual of what you’re finest at. The author and poet Ocean Vuong, as an illustration, is the type of particular person one might fairly describe in a press launch as “one of the defining voices of his generation” with out elevating any eyebrows. It’s not stunning, then, that when Vuong publicly revealed that he’s a photographer, too, he quickly landed a solo exhibition on the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Hudson Valley photograph mecca now housed in a lovingly restored four-story manufacturing facility constructing. Without having seen the present, one would possibly assume that Vuong’s images is the nepo child of his writing. That query is unavoidable — let’s simply say that the majority artists’ first exhibitions aren’t in spacious galleries at venues like this. But, to be honest, most artists’ first exhibitions don’t appear to be this: The pictures come out swinging. It’s genuinely a terrific present. 

Vuong has apparently been taking footage ever since he was a young person, when a good friend handed him a Nikon digital camera to shoot flash photographs of their basement punk present. Something clicked, and he saved photographing, the pictures creating in tandem together with his writing. This first exhibition, Sống — Vietnamese for “to live” — captures the New England immigrant expertise of Vuong’s writing, and extra particularly the connection he solid together with his brother, Nicky, within the wake of their mom’s dying in 2019. The exhibition is accompanied by a sold-out artist e book that reveals Vuong’s fluency with photograph historical past — referencing figures from Nicéphore Niépce to Garry Winogrand to Raymond Meeks — and can make you cry by web page three. Though he doesn’t state the plain, the work participates in images’s longstanding custom of considering dying, significantly the dying of 1’s mom.

Interestingly, Vuong’s portraits of Nicky are visually lovely however at occasions verge on feeling a bit of trite — telling greater than displaying and posed in ways in which really feel acquainted, as when he lies in a area at an angle that pointedly echoes that of the river behind him in “Nicky after 12 hour shift” (2025). “Nicky (slide)” too, is a superbly composed {photograph} that captures the awkward melancholy of being no-longer-child however not-quite-adult, however its neatness arrests the load of its material. Photographing a beloved one may be exhausting — painful, even — however a few of these photographs are a bit of too frictionless, leaving the viewer at a distance.

Indeed, what makes the remainder of the work nice is its particularity. Vuong has a watch for quotidian particulars that punch you within the abdomen when acknowledged plainly: the crumpled Dunkin’ Donuts bag framed by Buddhist statues in his mom’s nail salon, the hand greedy a doorway by a stickered whiteboard with 5 handwritten life objectives. The fleeting ephemera of actual folks in actual locations and the quiet specificity of all they depart behind. Looking at Vuong’s gorgeously worn landscapes as a fellow New Englander who took up images due to the pull I felt towards the postindustrial corners of my hometown, I used to be overcome with recognition. He captures the feel of these in-between locations which are each rundown and lushly wild, their accumulation of a deep and unknowable historical past — the overgrown path, the graffitied brick constructing whose authentic objective you’ll be able to solely guess at now. Vuong’s mom discovered his pictures unhappy (and so did mine), however I’ve all the time felt there was extra to it than that. In the artist e book, he captures it completely: “I ask the ghosts to show us what to make of their lives.”

Ocean Vuong: Sống continues on the Center for Photography at Woodstock (25 Dederick Street, Kingston, New York) by May 10. The exhibition was organized by the establishment.