Ocean Vuong

I was really bowled over by Ocean Vuong on the always excellent PhotoWork podcast, which, I think, sprang from Sasha Wolf's book, PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice.

He really seems like such a deep-felt person and brings a literary sensibility to his work. That's no accident, because he began his artistic career as a poet and he's an acclaimed novelist. His debut poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds is visually compelling and haunting:

“Prayer for the Newly Damned”

Dearest father, forgive me for I have seen.
Behind the wood fence, a field lit
with summer, a man pressing a shank
to another man's throat. Steel turning to light
on sweat-slick neck. Forgive me
for not twisting this tongue into the shape
of Your name. For thinking:
thus must be how every prayer
begins—the word Please cleaving
the wind into fragments, into what
a boy hears in his need to know
how pain blesses the body back
to its sinner...

The occasion of the podcast is Vuong's debut exhibition at the Center for Photography at Kingston: Ocean Vuong: Sống.

Ocean Vuong’s Intimate Debut Photo Exhibition Navigates Grief and Survival

Offering a new lens on the spaces and themes found in his writing, the poet and novelist’s photography exhibition centres on his younger brother and himself in the aftermath of personal loss

AnOtherAnOther

Speaking of Sasha Wolf

Wolf is a gallerist (not sure if that's the best description) who does so much more for the photography community than just promoting her own people.

Here's a talk she did quite a few years ago, where she talks about her artists and how they fit her particular world view of formalist photography, specializing in documentary and post-documentary work, and her emphasis on not reinventing the wheel.

Recently, she's been posting on Instagram about this concept of “Post Documentary.”

I really really am attracted to this concept. As simple as it may seem, it opens up the documentary form. To be honest, though, I’ve tried to wrap my head around it. When I think of documentary photography, I think of a spectrum from, say, Walker Evans through to Sebastião Salgado, whose work has a quality that transcends documentary, then, past documentary, to, say, Jeff Wall, whose work occasionally looks like documentary but is entirely staged.

This helps: Bryan Schutmaat (who is in Wolf’s universe) responds in Photowork to the question Do you associate your work with a particular genre of photograph? thus:

“I usually try to deflect these kinds of questions since all genres have their pitfalls. But, if pressed, I suppose I’d say I’m a documentary-style photographer who evolved from Walker Evans’ approach to the photograph as ‘lyric document.’ In recent years, photographers working in this vein have strayed far from the traditional documentary practice in an effort to relay deeper expression and to affirm poetic truth rather than actual truth, which strict documentary ethics would impede. I think this is good for photography.”

…for a more acutely focused simplicity

“I have stripped back my equipment to the bare minimum for a more acutely focused simplicity. From now on I will deliver my work to market in small handmade books and soon, prints. Large and small.”

After and before

I find late evening encounters with foxes entirely enchanting. To share a moment in a densely urban environment with a wild animal and hold its gaze, is entirely magical. I’ve been thinking deeply about my work and archive. Been slogging away at this photographic life for decades. Did some things well, others badly.

paultreacyPaul Treacy