Literary Hub » Ocean Vuong: {Photograph} First, Author Second?

“Unlike writing, which is a vocation mired with maybes, the camera, for all of its complex mechanisms, can only say yes,” Ocean Vuong wrote. “Photography is, for me, a medium of unanimous affirmation.” The embrace of such affirmation is made manifest at CPW in Kingston, New York on the writer’s first exhibition highlighting his visible follow: Ocean Vuong: Sống (till May 10, 2026). He joins a rarefied legacy of writers-turned-photographers, just like the French queer icon Hervé Guibert or the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole.

Displaying some 40 pictures, primarily inkjet prints, these pictures span moments from 2009, when Vuong first borrowed a pal’s Nikon, to photos snapped as lately as 2025. CPW produced the exhibition in-house; it grew from a June 2025 New York Times Opinion piece, “My Brother’s Keeper,” which launched Vuong’s pictures to the general public for the primary time. The article explored the poignant sibling renaissance between Vuong and his youthful brother Nicky after the demise of their mom; the decade-wide gulf between their life experiences grew to become much less notable as the method of bereavement threw them along with nice depth.

“American brothers” (2024)

Dispossession is a inventive impetus for Vuong: “I make things out of loss,” he wrote. These pictures of shared grief and love between brothers have been joined by ones Vuong had taken in his mom’s nail salon over the course of a single day—a sequence he had supposed to return to, however by no means did earlier than she in the end offered the enterprise. Co-curators Marina Chao and Adam Ryan reached out to Vuong with the thought of “activating these two different bodies” as “this collision of two projects.” Chao identified that Vuong has, in actual fact, been photographing since earlier than he was a author. “He was talking about exhibitions being really iterative… He was describing exhibitions as—in his mind—like readings,” she mentioned. Ryan added: “What connects the writing with the photographs is that both are intensely honest—and that, for me at least, is where a lot of their power comes from.”

Those who’ve pored over Vuong’s novels or poems will discover a connection along with his follow as a visible storyteller, though Chao famous his talent is evident to those that aren’t devotees—“even if you know nothing, even if you didn’t read the text.” His readership is spliced alongside a generational divide, and Chao famous how, when the exhibition opened, an aged couple who had by no means heard of Vuong-as-writer reacted emotionally to his work purely as a photographer.

Vuong’s mom acquired an opportunity to see him as a profitable author, not as an rising photographer.

“He’s very respectful of the medium and its history and people who have studied it or work with it,” Chao mentioned. The workforce revealed a companion artist e book, which reproduces the opinion piece in a deconstructed vogue alongside re-sequenced pictures; the duvet {photograph} is of a blueberry farmer from Massachusetts who had a pebble in his shoe and was taking it out.

“Nicky (slide)” (2025)

The exhibition’s first wall presents a big {photograph} of Nicky holding their mom’s urn to set the scene. Chao mentioned: “Ocean’s natural inclination would maybe have been… to kind of mix more”—which the curators did on the final wall—“all these things coming together less linearly.” Vuong collected quotes from his brother, articulated in lower vinyl above a number of the pictures. “Ocean was very insistent that he wanted Nicky’s voice to be in the show, to the extent that he was seen as a collaborator, not merely his subject.”

This line between topic/collaborator is a difficult one to fulfill. In the preliminary article, when Vuong recounted exhibiting pictures of the nail salon to his mom—bubblegum-pink partitions, black leather-based chairs, uncovered calves—she responded: “I just… I just didn’t know our life was so damn sad.” The pictures learn otherwise, essentially, in a gallery setting: a quotidian actuality to ponder, moderately than a chronicle {of professional} obligation. Where Vuong grew up in New England, the thought of the longer term was narrowed into only a few paths ahead, primarily becoming a member of the navy, being an worker on the Samuel Colt armory, or working at a nail salon.

“Nicky (slide)” (2025)

“I think it’s something a lot of artists struggle with, where your parents aren’t really gonna fully get it,” Ryan famous. Vuong’s mom acquired an opportunity to see him as a profitable author, not as an rising photographer. But even being supportive of him when he first acquired revealed in a regional journal—one she couldn’t learn—“there’s this barrier she can’t cross to join him to really see the extent of his creativity,” Ryan acknowledged. “And I had to imagine there may have been something like that with his photographs as well, where there’s a place that she could not go in seeing the pictures.” Inherent in Vuong’s method, nevertheless, is that issues can include each magnificence and ugliness without delay, with out falling right into a binary. He sees energy, and potential subversion, inside moments of commonplace.

“I never felt I write about marginal people,” Vuong said throughout a chat. “Marginal to whom?” he challenged. He described centering his world on individuals for whom white picket fence Americana is unique, and violent rupture is extra widespread, particularly as tied to immigrant expertise and diaspora. Chao famous what number of Asian Americans’ experiences resonate inside his photos: the way in which Vuong grew up in a nail salon, others grew up in, say, a restaurant, or orbited round their mother and father’ enterprise in a formative means. “Most of our parents came here working in those kinds of jobs,” Chao remarked. Given this, pictures of his brother have been a means of “seeing the Asian body at rest, as opposed to the way that it’s been depicted in the United States historically, as often a beast of burden,” Ryan mentioned.

“Memorial” (2023)

Moreover, Vuong is dedicated to the medium past mere doc or testomony: in his textual content, he references Nicéphore Niépce’s Nineteenth-century digital camera obscura and cites Garry Winogrand, situating his work in a bigger photographic historical past. Nan Goldin was a giant affect on him, and although she’s not talked about in his textual content, he has photos from 2022 of them sitting and laughing collectively on his Instagram, captioned “Nan being Nan.” He began by photographing basement punk reveals in Hartford, Connecticut impressed by her uncooked method.

Ryan famous: “I see him within a continuum of people who use the camera as a tool of self investigation. … It’s a kind of self-documentary. And that’s probably true of his writing as well.” He added: “I think he’s just a deeply sensitive person, and I think that’s what maybe comes through the most in the photographs: an ineffable thing where you’re so in tune with and still curious about your own reactions to things.” It’s maybe no shock that Vuong’s intention is to publish a monograph down the road.

Chao famous that he has the “thing” that at all times charms her about photographers: “When you’re out with them, you’re walking past something, and they stop. You’re just walking on the street, you’re having a chat, and you’re not even taking in, really, everything that’s going on around you. And then they stop for a second, and they saw whatever—a door, you know? Everything is information. Everything is coming at you, and you’re feeling it, and you’re translating it.”

Featured picture: “Nicky and Ocean in bed” (2025)