Ocean Vuong Is a Legitimately Good Photographer
One might assume that his photography is the nepo baby of his writing, but this is genuinely a great show.
KINGSTON, NY — Being really, really good at something is a double-edged sword: People will forever judge everything you do by the standard of what you’re best at. The writer and poet Ocean Vuong, for instance, is the sort of person one could reasonably describe in a press release as “one of the defining voices of his generation” without raising any eyebrows. It’s not surprising, then, that when Vuong publicly revealed that he’s a photographer, too, he soon landed a solo exhibition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Hudson Valley photo mecca now housed in a lovingly restored four-story factory building. Without having seen the show, one might assume that Vuong’s photography is the nepo baby of his writing. That question is unavoidable — let’s just say that most artists’ first exhibitions aren’t in spacious galleries at venues like this. But, to be fair, most artists’ first exhibitions don’t look like this: The photographs come out swinging. It’s genuinely a great show.
Vuong has apparently been taking pictures ever since he was a teenager, when a friend handed him a Nikon camera to shoot flash photos of their basement punk show. Something clicked, and he kept photographing, the images developing in tandem with his writing. This first exhibition, Sống — Vietnamese for “to live” — captures the New England immigrant experience of Vuong’s writing, and more specifically the connection he forged with his brother, Nicky, in the wake of their mother’s death in 2019. The exhibition is accompanied by a sold-out artist book that reveals Vuong’s fluency with photo history — referencing figures from Nicéphore Niépce to Garry Winogrand to Raymond Meeks — and will make you cry by page three. Though he doesn’t state the obvious, the work participates in photography’s longstanding tradition of contemplating death, particularly the death of one’s mother.
Interestingly, Vuong’s portraits of Nicky are visually beautiful but at times verge on feeling a little trite — telling more than showing and posed in ways that feel familiar, as when he lies in a field at an angle that pointedly echoes that of the river behind him in "Nicky after 12 hour shift" (2025). "Nicky (slide)" too, is a perfectly composed photograph that captures the awkward melancholy of being no-longer-child but not-quite-adult, but its neatness arrests the weight of its subject matter. Photographing a loved one can be hard — painful, even — but some of these images are a little too frictionless, leaving the viewer at a distance.
Indeed, what makes the rest of the work great is its particularity. Vuong has an eye for quotidian details that punch you in the stomach when stated plainly: the crumpled Dunkin’ Donuts bag framed by Buddhist statues in his mother’s nail salon, the hand grasping a doorway by a stickered whiteboard with five handwritten life goals. The fleeting ephemera of real people in real places and the quiet specificity of all they leave behind. Looking at Vuong’s gorgeously worn landscapes as a fellow New Englander who took up photography because of the pull I felt toward the postindustrial corners of my hometown, I was overcome with recognition. He captures the texture of those in-between places that are both rundown and lushly wild, their accumulation of a deep and unknowable history — the overgrown path, the graffitied brick building whose original purpose you can only guess at now. Vuong’s mother found his photographs sad (and so did mine), but I’ve always felt there was more to it than that. In the artist book, he captures it perfectly: “I ask the ghosts to show us what to make of their lives.”
Installation view of photographs by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong: Sống continues at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (25 Dederick Street, Kingston, New York) through May 10. The exhibition was organized by the institution.
