004 → photography
Before I got into photography, I had a hobby of making music videos of my friends in middle school. I would film with my beated red canon powershot. It was integral for me to visualize the music I was hearing, which meant that my friends had to be the subjects. Eventually they got annoyed at how much I was sticking the camera in their faces, and maybe it was selfish of me not to care but we were little teens!!!!! I’m not gonna waste our time going into the should haves and the shouldn’ts. We look back at these videos now in a more nostalgic light. As terrible as they were, I’m glad that we have them to look back.
My interest in making music videos faded and I got into photography midway into high school. After being gifted a DSLR for my 17th birthday, I started shooting pictures as class historian. I continued until my senior year, when I began to take my photography more seriously and began investing my time shooting with film. I was taking an intro photography course that made me fell in love with darkroom processes. When covid had cut my senior year short and I had been forced to launch myself straight into adulthood, I found myself finding the most inspiration in my day to day life. And when there was nothing to do during the early days of the pandemic, all you could do safely was drive around the bay. So that’s what I did, and I always brought my camera.
A good handful of the images that I am proud of were taken during the pandemic. It’s weird to have come of age during that time, and no one really gave us the space to properly process that. My HS graduating class and I didn’t have our ceremony or prom, we never returned to campus after March 2020, and because travel had been largely restricted, most of us stayed in San Jose when we started college. Zoom college. It’s a whole fucking thing. But basically we all felt stuck. We hadn’t gotten the big final ceremonial close to our K-12 years, but we also didn’t have the experience of stepping foot on college campus for the first time. My images from 2020-2021 felt quite melancholy.
The subjects of my work picks up around 2022 when life began to move a bit faster. I shot everyone and everything. At this point in my life, my friends were playing shows, we were going to shows, and we were making art. For some of us, these were moments where it was our first time going out and having fun. My photographs became documentative of the life we were living. I knew in some way that we were going to want to look back at these when we’re old like raisins (which I am actually quite excited for....growing old is a privilege.!!!!).
As I continue to evolve, both as an artist and as human person, I see my photograhy continuing along that sort of documentative tone. I want to capture my life as it is and how it changes. I want my loved ones to see themselves in a different light. Despite all the buuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhlllllshiet happening right now in our fucked ass world, there are still moments in between that make living on this earth worth fighting for. I try to capture those moments.
But also sometimes I just shoot something bc flower=pretty. Or something just sticks out to me in a certain way... like “Wow i really like how that looks.”
Anyways, this was the medium I started out first. I was a heavy doodler as a young student, but didn’t have the connection (or discipline) to follow through to invest in some form of drawing or illustration. I grew up loving photos because it was how I got to know my family’s life back in Vietnam and how they lived before the war. They shot their lives as is; there are photographs of my aunts and uncles as children, playing in their neighborhoods with soldiers in the background. My late grandfather, floating in wide open lake. My grandmother, playing with my mother as a young infant.
In some ways, I feel like I’m continuing a generations long project. Photography as memory preservation. How will we be remembered when we are no longer around? Is there a way for us to control that?