Vuong kept the practice close by, quietly making thousands of photographs during his ascent to becoming one of the literary world\u2019s most recognisable voices. A collection of these is now going on show at CPW in the Hudson Valley, encouraged by the likes of Goldin and Raymond Meeks. It marks the first time his photographs are being exhibited, yet they feel familiar. Symbology bleeds between images and the words many know so well: the close quarters of the nail salon, the vantage over Connecticut\u2019s vast sprawl, the long shadow of the American war machine made manifest in helmets, bandages and patriotic paraphernalia.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The photographs are also an intimate study of grief. Many were made with his younger brother following the loss of their mother, a woman central to his storytelling. To English speakers, the exhibition\u2019s name, S\u1ed1ng, conjures musicality (an incidental emblem of Vuong\u2019s dexterity across media) but the word\u2019s actual Vietnamese meaning, \u201cto live\u201d, offers the more pertinent reading as the brothers navigate what life means after experiencing death.<\/p>\n
Speaking from rural Massachusetts, Ocean Vuong reflects on the \u201cnaked\u201d act of photography and its capacity to speak in lieu of words.<\/p>\n
Megan Williams: How and why did you first find your way to photography?\u00a0<\/p>\n Ocean Vuong: Photography was my first practice, back when I was 17, 18. One day, I went home and I showed my mother one of my first publications. It was a tiny poem in the Connecticut River Review, a local little journal. I was so foolish because in my pride, I ran to her in her nail salon and I said, \u201cMa, look. A poem, I did it,\u201d and then her face dropped, and she said, \u201cWell, son, it\u2019s good for you. I wish I could read it.\u201d I forgot, silly me: my mother\u2019s illiterate.\u00a0<\/p>\n So I borrowed my friend\u2019s camera, the same camera I used to take the skate videos and [capture] the punk shows that they were in, and I started to shoot around our neighbourhood. A poem was not legible to her, but a photo was, so I thought maybe I can reveal my vision to her. I went to the pharmacy, printed out a stack of photos and she said, \u201cGosh. I didn\u2019t know our life was so sad.\u201d It was just photos of the mills that were broken down, the highways, the empty streets at night. I thought it was beautiful and informative, but she was absolutely right. She uses the word \u201cbu\u1ed3n\u201d in Vietnamese, which if you look in the dictionary, will say \u201csad\u201d. But in Vietnamese, there are more connotations to that word. One would go look at a sunset as a Vietnamese person and say, \u201cAh, bu\u1ed3n qu\u00e1\u201d \u2013 \u201cAh, so sad\u201d \u2013 not to cry a deep sorrow or melancholy, but to say, \u201cHow beautifully sad that this will go away.\u201d So she used that word, and then I just realised [photography] was something more.\u00a0<\/p>\n MW: I feel your books have such a kinship with An-My L\u00ea. Her photography deals with the psychic debris and performance and iconography of war, which are threaded into your writing. I also see these themes in your images. Do you see a connective tissue there?\u00a0<\/p>\n OV: Yes. Also, her interest in taking photographs of re-enactors and the clandestine pre-life of war, right? She takes these photographs in the American southwest desert where military training happens for Iraq, the war that was my sort of coming-of-age conflict as a millennial growing up in the early aughts. The Iraq, Afghanistan Wars, the war on terrorism, the never-ending wars that we\u2019ve now come to associate with the Bush-Obama years. What I love about her work is that you can see there is a throughline between the American boy in the cowboy hat shooting a cap gun in his backyard, which is an innocuous picture of wholesome American boyhood, to physical war that serves an empire. An-My L\u00ea was ahead of her time when she really understood that.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n MW: Can I ask how the images were made with you and your brother, and how you used the camera to work through a period of grief and loss?\u00a0<\/p>\n OV: I always carry a camera \u2013 it\u2019s now ingrained in me. It\u2019s part of my writing practice.\u00a0So when my brother moved in with me, the same process continued. He was just in my view now. I was entangled in his life and he in mine. We\u2019re ten years apart, so there\u2019s a power dynamic: I\u2019m an established professional and he came to me at age 20, not even able to drink, working wage work, which he still does, barely able to drive. It was almost like inheriting a child in many ways. You can see through a [particular] photograph that his room is closer to a teenager\u2019s world. There\u2019s stuffed animals, anime posters. I got to know him through all of this.\u00a0<\/p>\n I would always have my camera on my dining room table, no matter where I lived, and I\u2019d start to grab it when he was around. Sometimes if I had a tripod, I would let him compose it and then he would step into the frame. So it\u2019s been really, really beautiful that I can share the camera, which you can\u2019t really do with writing because I write by hand \u2013 my handwriting, my ideas \u2013 and you can\u2019t really share the pen. Also, the pen hovers, hesitates, crosses things out, whereas the camera, it takes. It\u2019s much more democratic, I think, than the pen. It accepts everything in the frame, and sometimes there are things I don\u2019t see until much later.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe camera is much more democratic, I think, than the pen. It accepts everything in the frame\u201d \u2013 Ocean Vuong<\/p>\n MW: What is the editing process like for you? Is it similar to how you might approach a sentence or a story?\u00a0<\/p>\n OV: It\u2019s much closer to poetry. And that was a strength I didn\u2019t know I had until I started to edit for viewing. When I did my poetry collection, I would tape the poems on a long wall and each poem was like a photograph. There\u2019s no connective tissue, but you have to use resonance and association and velocity, shapes, patterns. It\u2019s really about building sequential repercussion through pattern-making rather than through linearity. And so I was surprised to learn that I was pretty familiar with this, as a poet creating poetry anthologies and collections.\u00a0<\/p>\n With that said, it\u2019s still really hard because the photographs are much more forgiving. The possibilities are so limitless that you can be incapacitated by it, whereas sometimes with a poem, you can say, \u201cAll right, these two poems are too loud, they can\u2019t really stand next to each other. They start to take away from each other. You need a quieter poem here.\u201d Whereas in photography, again, even two really big, busy photographs \u2013 depending on what\u2019s in them \u2013 have more connective joints that could still work.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>
![\"Ocean](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/468607.jpg\")
Ocean Vuong, Memorial, 2023\u00a9 Ocean Vuong<\/p>\n<\/a>
![\"Ocean](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/468606.jpg\")
Ocean Vuong, Nicky and Ocean in Bed, 2025\u00a9 Ocean Vuong<\/p>\n
![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/468599.jpg\")
Ocean Vuong, Thuy\u2019s Altar, 2020\u00a9 Ocean Vuong<\/p>\n