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.
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?
I find photography to be more vulnerable because it proves where I stood, what I looked at in time, whereas so much of my writing is from memory. And a lot of memory can be very foggy and there s a lot of fabrication and openness and invention in the sentence because you can control what comes in and what s out.
But in the camera, you can t always control. You still need the world to be a photographer. You don t need the present to be a writer, whereas you always need the present to be a photographer. To sit down and dream up a text, you have to go back into your mind or your memory, so you forsake the present.
About reality in the present, you collaborated with your brother. I wanted to ask you how did this collaboration begin and what was it like to portray yourself together in front of the camera.
Well, it felt really natural. Because I ve always been photographing my family, mostly for my own references, but also to show them themselves.
Growing up in the 90s as immigrants, photography was very expensive. You had to buy film and to develop it, and for people working in factories and nail salons, it was a tremendous luxury to be photographed. And so every photograph was very staged, everyone stood facing the camera, being aware of it. Everyone said cheese.
When I got the digital camera, I started shooting my family and it felt like such an opulent endeavour to take photos of my mother candidly in the midst of her work, of my brother playing in the river. For me, it felt like this very new bounty and abundance that I got to take photos of my family when they might not be paying attention to the camera. I could capture them in more honest renditions of themselves.
So was it like a form of redemption in a way? Or did you just start because you liked it?
It started because I was a photographer before I was a writer. But I didn t think of it as an art. I didn t think anything could be an art. I thought growing up I had very few options that were given to a child in my neighbourhood. It was work in the nail salon, work in the factory, join the army, or go to the Job Corps, which was a training program for construction workers, HVAC, that kind of thing. I thought to be an artist someone had to give you the card. I looked at my wallet and I did not have the artist card. I kind of stumbled into the art world and the writing world.
I took photographs of my friends bands, of them skateboarding, and they were very functional. You took those photographs so you could take them to the local skate shop, so your friends could get sponsored, which meant free skateboards and shoes. Then one day I went and looked at the photography section in the library, and that s when I found the work of Daido Moriyama, Chris Killip, who also took punk shows in England in the 60s and 70s, and the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri.
I learned from Ghirri because he did something that you don t really see in writing: a lot of subject matter that he takes, a lot of writers ignore. I never believed that that is the only way to tell stories. So a lot of my work has these dead ends in my writing. A lot of my novels, characters do things that don t add up to anything. They have conversations in parking lots and cars and it doesn t go anywhere, which is the ultimate faux pas of Western storytelling. It must add up and be efficient.
But I think photography taught me that you can take a photograph of a mattress in a field, and you ll never see an equivalent of that in a novel. For me photography and this tradition taught me a lot about what you can center and where you can slow down and describe, whereas most other literary dogmas would tell you that you have to move on and get to the point. Photography taught me that there is a lot of power you can take on the way to the main thing.
In your work, both in writing and in your photography, when you narrate diaspora there s a sense of optimism found in compassion. I wanted to ask you if photography has helped you remain attached to compassion rather than to harmful illusions.
Well, there s no easy way to answer that because we are already too late to have one side or the other to the archive. There s already so much in the photographic archive that leads to disillusionment, propaganda, seduction, particularly in advertising, press photography, state-sponsored narratives. What is the truth, what is the lie, and how photography historically borrows the sense of truth and reality in order to tell lies, in order to seduce people to do things.
Anytime you have an art that frames a minority of the world, like a photograph, it leaves the rest of the world out of it. It s about taking a small hole puncher and punching a tiny hole out of the world. Anytime you do that, you re working with myth rather than reality.
To me photography is much closer to poetry because when you look at a poem and ask what is this poem about, in a class of 13 students every student has a different answer and all of them are right. Nobody s wrong. Anytime you re taking such a small part of the world to represent the world, you re dealing with something closer to myth than reality. Photography is no different.
One of my favorite artists, Trinh T. Minh-ha, who is also a filmmaker, says the camera is an invention of Europe. It s not an accident that a continent that started colonialism would also make an object that literally objectifies people. When you re working with a camera, whether it s film, cinematography or photography, you re objectifying the world. There is no clean approach to that.
Every photographer has dipped their hands into that power. They re stained with that power. And I love that acknowledgement because in writing there s still the fantasy of an absolute ethical position. This is true in academia too. Sometimes academia can be very binary. There s a purity one could achieve through peer review, through rigor, through repetition, through deep thinking. Whereas Trinh T. Minh-ha says that if you pick up a camera, your hands are already red. So the question is, what do you do with red hands?
So do you think your photographic work is a form of staying in between, fighting against binarism and reduction?
Yes, because anytime you re working with art you have a hierarchy. What art is most valuable to me is that it s one person recommending a different hierarchy than what the dominant culture proposes.
In the same way someone like William Eggleston or Luigi Ghirri or Nan Goldin took photographs of people or subjects that society said were not worthy of replication. And they did it anyway. That reorients a different hierarchical structure, a different lens of consideration.
I don t know if it s redemptive. I don t know if it s enough. I hesitate to say that any art form is enough in relation to historic violence. I don t think an art practice is enough to recoup historic violence and loss, but it does resituate the narrative and that is still very important.
I noticed that in your work you photograph photographs. I read that you defined your writing as an echo and that On Earth We re Briefly Gorgeous is not a novel but the ghost of a novel. So do you feel that your photography might also be a kind of ghost of photography?
Oh, 100%. We re all haunted. America is haunted, history is haunted, our memories are haunted and the photograph is still an object to be photographed. Replicating it and restructuring it shows that there is an archive that families, particularly immigrant families, salvage and sometimes it s the only link they have.
In my family s photographs, on the back, there are diaristic notes. My grandmother, who was the only literate one in our family, would write strange musings. She would say this is the day this happened, someone did this, or sometimes she would have existential reflections. She treated the back of the photograph as a tabulation of time.
I always thought that was beautiful. Here s a woman with no formal education, who spent her whole life working various jobs and living in poverty, who had an innate inkling for hybrid texts. Now it s fashionable to have hybrid texts, but my grandmother was doing it in the 80s. She was writing next to the image. The idea of having a notebook was too foreign to her, so the photographs became another object that lived outside of just being a photo. I wanted to document that as well.
You live outside the city. You said you chose to live outside a big city in order to experience life and real people more closely and stay in contact with reality. How does this choice shape your artistic practice today, especially in this tense political moment in the US?
One of America s most historic challenges is to know itself. America is so large and it has a very imbalanced media system in which the coastal cultural centres control a lot of the narrative. Living in a city makes sense for a successful writer because of the opportunities and the exchange. But it s not an accident that a lot of New Yorkers say I m not from America, I m from New York. There s truth to that, but there s also a deprivation in that. You start to live in a bubble where your values are replicated and given back to you.
A lot of my family still lives here. America loves the escape story. In movies and novels it s always about the great escape. Get out of town, reinvent yourself. As an immigrant, I don t really have that choice, and it s not a choice I want because it s a fantasy.
I live in the country because my family is still here, in Connecticut. I came to America with nine refugees and they still need my support. I can t abandon my family. But I also like being close to people who don t have the same values as me. I like being close to people who disagree with me. That s part of the task of being an artist, to know the unknown.
Sometimes you hire someone to fix your windows and they show up with a Trump hat. You have to deal with it. You have to have a conversation. It brings me closer to the reality of the world. And sometimes you realize you have more in common than what your beliefs are. A lot of people have been seduced into a binary approach, picking left and right, when in fact they have more in common than politicians want us to believe.
Do you discuss your work with them?
Not much. In the same way that a lot of my family don t know my work. Many of them are working class. Reading what The New Yorker has to say is not central to their lives. Reading a book takes eight or ten hours and most of my family work ten or twelve hour shifts. When would they have time?
I kind of like that they don t care. They didn t care for thirty years, why would they care now? I find that fortunate because some writers can t take themselves out of the house. They come in with the persona and it dominates the household. My family think I m a teacher, which is better. In Vietnamese culture a teacher is noble and respected. But if I said I m a poet and I spend all day looking out a window moving words back and forth, they might think I m crazy.
Did your photographic work change your relationship with your family? Was it more understandable for them?
They re excited, but they re still perplexed. They ll say, okay, but why are these on a wall? As if to say we have photos, they should be in an album in a closet and we ll take it out once in a while. It s still alien to them that strangers would come to a museum to look at photographs. But I think it s good because it makes me question myself too: why would anyone want to look at this?
Ocean Vuong: Sống is on view at CPW, from January 31 to May 10, 2026.
