Here, writer Ocean Vuong weaves a tale of two Julys: the first reveling in the quotidian beauty of his mother Rose’s Hartford nail salon, the second chronicling a string of humid New England days spent with his brother 15 years later, mourning her death. The early days of the summer month are complex for Vietnamese refugees like those in Vuong's family tree, who arrived stateside after surviving America's decades of warmongering in Southeast Asia. It's also a period, he notes, where service workers in salons and elsewhere trade the holiday celebrations for high-demand seasonal work. "This tension, I feel, is inherent in the American project as a whole," says Vuong, "that even rest and recreation to crown the nation's independence is dependent on labor and loss." Below, the acclaimed poet reflects further on his first public foray into photography, and the eerie plasticity of time.
I started taking photographs during my freshman year at community college. My friend, who played bass in a local punk band, had just gotten a 2006 Nikon D80 and, since I had the musical propensities of a fire hydrant, asked me to document their shows, which took place in dingy basements and dive bars up and down I-91. After weeks of shooting flash on the edges of mosh pits, my back sweating against a wall, something strange started to happen.
I grew to see a kind of magic inside the frame, one I would only understand more fully as a writer: that though a work of art can be bolstered by context, there is just as much narrative propulsion—perhaps more—when information is omitted. The 35mm prime lens cleaves the world away, leaving only a slice, so that the viewer must fill in the rest with their own fictions. Why is it that, upon seeing some photographs, I can also hear them, can smell the air in the room, sometimes even the words spoken—the tones, the timbre?
Three years later, I asked my friend if I could borrow his camera to shoot my family—and he obliged. On a sweltering day in July 2009, home after my first year at Brooklyn College, I brought the Nikon to my mother Rose’s nail salon to shoot the employees (my mother, my aunt Sen, their friend Phuong) as they worked, ate, laughed, stared out the windows in moments of boredom and idleness, and cared for my then-infant cousin, Sara. At one point, in a moment of sheer serendipity, my cousin Victor stopped by, hours after his release from a two-month stint in rehab.
I hoped to return in the fall to document the salon in another season, inspired by Walker Evans’s Alabama sharecropper photos with James Agee and the documentary work of William Gedney and Gordon Parks (also a fine novelist). But three months later, with the historic recession sweeping its scythe across the country, my mother declared bankruptcy, sold her business, and everything outside those frames vanished.
Back in 2006, a week after being asked to photograph those punk shows, I visited my community college library and started looking at photo books. This was where I discovered other touchstones like Fan Ho, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Corky Lee, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, William Christenberry, Larry Fink, and Lisette Model. One such book was Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, a 1999 survey that utilized subgenres as its organizing principle to display notable works in the medium.
Upon encountering the “still life” section, with its expected sequence of agrarian production, Roman facades, and objets d’art, including Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ, I came upon what at first appeared to be a smashed bust. I soon discovered, upon reading the caption, that it was the head of an unknown Vietnamese man, shot in the mouth and lying dead in a field during the war in Vietnam.
Decomposed Face of a Dead North Vietnamese Soldier, Hue, was taken in 1968 (the year my mother was born) by photographer Donald McCullin. I resisted the urge to look away and spent a few moments studying the face, its contours ripped apart by the bullet’s velocity, the severe close-up exposing the man’s poor teeth, evincing his lack of access to dental care during war, colonialism, and famine; then I stared out the library’s windows, where the opulent autumnal light from a pine grove dappled the wooden tables, and closed the book.
Why did the mouth, contorted by the projectile, as if pried open by a finger, remind me of the mocking “faces” children make on play-grounds? Why did it feel like a cruel joke? I ask now what I did not know to ask then: If it were an American G.I. with his face split open, decomposed, would I have encountered it in a survey of still lifes in an artbook? I wonder if it would have ever been taken in the first place, and at such close range.
This is no knock on McCullin—however one feels about war photography, there are long-argued reasons and detractions to its purpose—but more a question about how art "survives,” and further, how the archival process can become a troubled medium of situated reification. Though I’m sure the dated book no longer reflects the curatorial vantages of the ICP, the anthology nonetheless raises an important historical question: Under what parameters, and by whom, does a racialized corpse get aestheticized as a still life?
Among shots of roosters, driftwood, legs of ham, succulent peaches and apples—quintessential Renaissance motifs from which the still life is derived—here lies, in gruesome displacement, the head of a man fighting the unlawful invasion of his country by an imperial power. Since the semiotic code of an index influences the meaning of an object, what would happen, for example, if this photo was placed under “portraits” or “military industrial artifacts” or “autopsies” or, to borrow from another section of that book, “everyday life”?
It is not uncommon for Vietnamese-American children to see themselves in media as corpses, often so mangled as to be indiscernible from one another, as it was the time I clicked, at 15, on a Wikipedia link and was blasted with a digitally enlarged photo of the My Lai Massacre: the pooling blood, the fingers, the toes, bits of shredded underwear. That is to say nothing of the hundreds of Vietnamese corpses replicated in Hollywood war films.
Looking back, I wonder if my desire to photograph the nail salon was a subconscious impulse, after encountering McCullin’s photo, to see the Vietnamese faces that fed me, the ones I kissed, the brows I wiped sweat from while they worked, alive. The camera, then, became a near hallucinatory tool to replicate the living as they moved through time. How else to say to each other, Live, live, live, but to press the shutter again and again, creating one’s own proof?
The nature of death in war then becomes the evidence of a people having survived that very war. I am here, we might say, because the people in these photos, the ones with names my mouth was taught to hold, did not become a corpse documented by a photographer on assignment.
I look back on that single day in 2009 and wish I had composed these shots differently; wish I was bolder, had read more, had more courage, was more at ease with the release button. Even in one day, I know I missed so much. Such regrets are only compounded by distance. But if image-making is articulating one’s desire for the world, as Moriyama says, then if nothing else, I wanted the people in those frames to be as they were, even if one of them, my mother, is no longer anywhere else but there.
Feeling bereft and seeking a contrived sense of closure art so often allows, I interlaced this photo essay with frames of my brother, Nicky, and bits of our life in New England, all taken in a single week in July 2023, 15 years later. The illusion of form perhaps more gratifying than the reality of chaos, I sequenced these photos to extend that single lost day in 2009 into a kind of “time accordion,” mimetic of how memory works—as interruption, hauntings, myths—but also as things that leach through the imagined borders we make of years.
In this way, I hope to regard time as a collaborator rather than the mode of erasure it’s so often claimed to be. Whether we want them to or not, memories survive. They remind us that a “still life” is also, if only in the frame’s fictive propulsion, still life.
