Ocean Vuong Instagram – overjoyed to finally share this project—a photo essay 15 years in the making—now featured in the latest issue of @cultured_mag
On a sweltering July day in 2009, I came home from college to photograph my mother and her coworkers during their shift at my mother’s nail salon. I intended this session to be the first of many, hoping to document them through the seasons. But three months later, with the recession in full swing, my mother declared bankruptcy and sold her salon. The place that sustained us for over two decades, from which my brother and I were raised, where we worked answering the phones, evaporated overnight. The photos I took that one fateful day would be the only ones I have of that place.
15 years later, perhaps as a cumbersome way of grieving, I spent a week in July photographing my brother, who moved in with me after our mother died. What began as a study of a place, the small but mighty people who live, labor, and lose there, became an exercise in looking at the only thing left of that place: my little brother, Nicky. I suppose some projects change the way some desires change through the years, not by deliberate searching, but by discovering a more-ness, a dynamism, in what remains. In this case, the person bound to us by blood.
A deep bow to @cultured_mag for featuring a selection from this ongoing project, along with an original essay on photography, memory, the vexed ethics of seeing, and which bodies the archive holds—and which it erases. (Link in bio)
Special thanks to @cigharvey , @anmynx , @tommykha , @maruteppei , @pierce_sapper , @nangoldinstudio , and @romanspataro , for your kind guidance and encouragement in my image work, which culminated in this being in the world.💕 | Posted on 28/Jun/2024 01:40:29
