Allan An, Contributing Photographer

For those more familiar with his writing, Ocean Vuong might seem an unlikely choice for a lecture on photography. Indeed, the bulk of the MacArthur Fellow’s oeuvre consists almost entirely of poetry and prose, including works like “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and “Time Is a Mother.” 

Regardless, Vuong drew a crowd –– among them photography students at the School of Art who had spent much of the day with him as part of the school’s Visiting Artists lecture series. That didn’t stop hundreds of non-graduate students from packing 32 Edgewood Gallery, itself a last-minute venue change due to the event’s popularity.

“I started taking photographs before I was a poet,” he said, offering context before diving into his work proper. “There’s something about the camera punching a hole out of the world where the mythology is compressed — what’s not there, film and life keep completing.”

Vuong’s lecture opened with an introduction from John Pilson, senior critic in photography at the School of Art. Before welcoming Vuong to the stage, he took a step back to acknowledge Donald Trump’s reelection. 

Pilson compared this political moment to the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, recalling similar shockwaves during his first weeks as a professor at the School of Art. 

“I saw activism, I heard conversations which felt like a certain train had left a certain station,” Pilson said, before ending on a more hopeful note — a fitting segue into Vuong’s lecture. “Inevitability was in the air — but I was also given powerful reminders that inevitability is not inevitable.”

With that, Vuong took the stage. Behind him, selections from a recent showcase at the Toledo Museum of Art — “Sống,” meaning “to live” in Vietnamese — dotted the projector screen, drawing a lesser-known passion of Vuong’s into the spotlight. 

For Vuong, photography involves a completion missing in language. What words leave in pieces, an image might restore. Its reparative power lends the medium even greater urgency: his mother, a Vietnamese refugee, cannot read Vuong’s Anglophone poetry. 

“Every word I put down was one word further away from my mother,” Vuong said, recalling his mother’s inability to read his first-ever publication. “Photos she could see. They became a bridge of visual legibility in ways that language was not.”

At the same time, Vuong also considers photography a preparatory act that enriches his written work even as it precedes it. He borrows this preliminary form of art-making from his photographic predecessors. 

For this practice in particular, Vuong credits Richard Billingham’s photobook, “Ray’s a Laugh.”

 “He was actually taking photos in order to paint his father — a body of work, which seemed to me so fully arrived and resolved, was actually preparatory,” said Vuong. 

With these remarks, Vuong began introducing his photographs in earnest, each as sensitive and elegant in their design as any one of his poems. As fragile as they may seem, however, a quiet defiance always simmers below the surface. 

Take his first photograph, for example: in it, a “Danger. Keep Out” sign obstructs a view of the Connecticut River Valley. 

Vuong turns even hilltops into middle-class luxuries, mourning the moments of leisure his immigrant mother never enjoyed. Landscapes lose their innocence, themselves images of privilege.

“When can you climb a mountain to watch the sunset when you work from dawn to dusk every single day?” Vuong asked. 

Sometimes, his images are unabashedly political in tone. On the cover of his debut poetry collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” is a photograph of Ocean as a child, alongside his mother and aunt. Ocean’s name and the collection’s title obscure their eyes. With the subtle erasure, Vuong hints at the historical amnesia the collection grapples with — but also insists on unharmed bodies.

“[The photo] came from a deep desire I had to correct how the Vietnamese body is indexed in the American imagination — often as a corpse, through photojournalism of the body in distress.” 

Through his work, Vuong seeks to dismantle systems of memory that celebrate and commodify pain — all while interrogating the politics that govern them. He confronts only the most devastating questions: “Whose body is aestheticized? Whose body is revealed? Whose body is forgotten by the archive?”

The camera lens plays more than the role of the observer; it also casts a violent, voyeuristic gaze. To repair the damage that even photography leaves behind, Vuong shifts his attention homeward. Some answers lie in the Vietnamese tradition of ancestor worship. 

“You could go to the most impoverished Vietnamese home, and the only photograph you’d see is the one on the altar,” he said. 

Despite their relative scarcity, Vuong sees potential — and great emotional range — in photographs and the kind of reparative memory they aim for. The photo becomes a permission to “curate joy” and a “shrine of loss,” said Vuong. 

Vuong chooses to dwell on the idea of “curating joy” — insisting on it throughout his entire body of work, not just in his photography. Even the most ordinary moments turn into occasions for joy: crying over McDonald’s, Vietnamese crawfish and houseplants beside an altar.  

Here, Vuong lingered on a slightly blurry photograph of his laughing mother. 

“This is the only photograph I have of my mother laughing,” Vuong said. “Growing up poor, film photography was so precious — candor was a privilege, a power. I’m proud that I’m the only one who captured her laughter.”

Towards the end of his lecture, Vuong introduced photographs of Nicky, his half-brother, whom he took pictures of after his mother’s passing. Nicky now occupies many of Vuong’s frames; in many ways, he embodies the “joy” that Vuong strives for. 

“Joy,” at once celebratory and private, takes on new life — and a startling directness — in Vuong’s photography. 

For former photography student Adrian Martinez Chavez, this fresh approach imbues Vuong’s already rich work with newfound dimension.

“It was really interesting to hear him talk about how his photos were personal and private — vulnerable, but not in the way his writing is. It’s not quite as embellished, and it feels more personal in that way — this is actually his brother, this is actually his life.”

Vuong concluded his lecture with an anecdote about his encounter with photographer Nan Goldin. 

Goldin once told him, “‘Ocean, sometimes I want to look at the world so much, I hate that the camera is in front of my face.’”

Recalling this moment, Vuong began to tear up. His sudden emotion lent the brief exchange a gravity that captivated his entire audience. 

Several seconds later, Vuong collected himself and continued the episode. For a moment, it felt as if he had lowered an imaginary camera from his own face. Casting his usual lyricism aside, he seemed to join his audience for the lecture’s most vulnerable moment yet. 

“For an artist so accomplished in her medium to immediately disregard it, for presence, a kind of love for being in the world … How many of us can say that? That we’d rather not have the medium, so we can be here?”

Vuong’s new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness,” debuts June 2025.