Ocean Vuong photographs the people and places that shaped his writing

Ocean Vuong is known for his words. Across poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, and novels On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and The Emperor of Gladness, he has become one of the most acclaimed literary voices of his generation. What’s less known is that, for as long as he’s been writing, Vuong has been making photographs. Sống – a new exhibition at CPW, its title meaning “to live” in Vietnamese and sounding, in English, like “song” – marks the first time this visual archive steps fully into public view, revealing how photography has been feeding his writing from the very beginning.

As a teenager growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, Vuong was the friend behind the camera at punk shows and with skate crews, filming tricks for sponsorship tapes which they’d send to local skate shops. Photography didn’t yet register as “art”. That shift came later, when he discovered the photography shelves at his community college – “the size of two microwaves” – and encountered Nan Goldin, Daido Moriyama, Sally Mann, Alec Soth and Judith Joy Ross. From there, the motive shifted away from stages and kickflips, towards his own family.

The pivot was both brutal and tender. At 18 or 19, he sprinted into his mother’s nail salon clutching a local journal. “I said, ‘Ma, I did it. Here it is, you know, here’s my name in print. It’s not a government document. It’s not a bill. It’s not a detention slip, you know, it’s a poem.’” She looked at the page and her face fell. “She said, ‘This is great, son. I wish I could read it.’ In the thrill of seeing his words in print, he had forgotten what success would mean inside an illiterate household. “I realised I can’t get published and run to my mum, like most children,” he says. “The more I succeed as a writer, the further away from her comprehension I would be.” 

So he picked up a borrowed Nikon and began photographing the park his mother never had time to walk in, the derelict buildings near their home, the textures of a working-class Vietnamese American life shaped by 12-hour shifts at the salon. The camera became a way of making his life legible to her. And when he handed his mother a stack of prints, she flipped through them carefully. “‘Wow’, she said, ‘I didn’t know our life was so sad.’” Vuong had found the images of broken mills, empty lots and rundown gas stations beautiful – but his mother’s response cut deeper. “She was correct. She became my first critic and found a theme I’m still digging into – that sadness is not so much of a feeling, but a system of historic knowledge; reasons and histories that bring about economic and industrial decline and blighted communities.” 

Crucially, that practice began to infiltrate the writing. “Taking a strong photograph in the photographic tradition helped me be in tune with the subject in deeply dynamic ways. And so when I started to describe these scenes in my fiction, in my poems, they were deeply embodied.”

If Vuong’s books move with the broken, looping logic of memory, Sống renders that same motion through sequence and framing. Spanning photographs made between 2009 and 2025, the exhibition and limited-edition book gather fragmented family portraits, landscapes of the Connecticut River Valley, interiors peppered with objects from generations of Vietnamese diasporic life, Buddhist mourning rituals, and an intimate study of his younger brother as they grieve and rebuild after their mother’s death. It’s structured around an oscillation between wide and tight frames of landscapes, tenement facades, porches, fences and rivers – and then suddenly a hand, a face and the frayed edge of an archival print.

“I’ve always been interested in capturing that ricochet, that whiplash between movement and absolute stillness and everything in between. The in-between-ness is actually what the camera can do better than the sentence” – Ocean Vuong

“Writing is about acceleration and deceleration,” he says. “Description is deceleration, exposition is acceleration. This oscillation between zooming in and zooming out is something I’ve done all the time.” The photographs follow the same rhythm. “I’ve always been interested in capturing that ricochet, that whiplash between movement and absolute stillness and everything in between. The in-between-ness is actually what the camera can do better than the sentence.”

That distinction between word and image is at the heart of Sống. For Vuong, the sentence is almost oppressive in its construction: “The sentence is full of order. It is a linear technology and is controlled and paced by punctuation. So there’s a lot of traffic control, and there’s a lot of contrivance.” Even if the first draft is “quite cooked”, every clause becomes a decision. “You cannot write a good sentence by accident,” he adds, citing the thoughts of Susan Sontag. The camera, by contrast, lives in excess and, a lot of the time, plain luck. “The camera has a larger consciousness than the photographer, so it accepts everything, and then some things you don’t even notice or see.” Sometimes he’s so overtaken by what’s happening that he hits the shutter “from the hip by accident”. Those somatic, half-willed frames often stun him later. “It’s an accident, but it’s not insignificant,” he says. “Sometimes those frames are the ones that take my breath away the most.”

He describes photography as “punching holes out of time” – not to damage the world, but to make more of it. In relation to his family, especially his younger brother, that “more” is urgent: “The camera does an instant mode of replication,” he says, “which means I get to make more of these people who are very singular.”

Sống crystallises this through an edit made in collaboration with photographer Raymond Meeks. Vuong handed over what he thought was the project, and Meeks kept asking for “more of the archive” until they were wading through nearly a thousand images. He pulled out frames Vuong had dismissed as “bad” or “throwaway” and placed them in new constellations. One diptych in the book shows, on the left, an old family snapshot of Vuong and his brother on the porch of their Hartford tenement, re-photographed on linen – the original print is torn straight through the centre. On the facing page, Meeks paired a recent image Vuong had made of a fence near a skate park, prised open where kids cut through. “I thought it was a throwaway image… just a hole in a fence,” Vuong admits. But together, the rip and the gap become almost unbearably precise. “It looks exactly the same, like the same angle, the same opening. And then the poetry, the metaphor of the fence being an entrance into another world, the photograph being… Oh my God, I just gasped. I couldn’t believe it.”

The book itself exists separately from the show, as he didn’t want a “portable exhibition”, but two related objects with their own lives. The displayed works include both colour and black-and-white works, while the book leans decisively into monochrome, in line with where his practice is heading. “Nowadays, I take almost all monochrome. It’s kind of where my sensibilities as a photographer [are] going,” he says. “I think I write in colour, but I shoot in black and white. Why? I don’t really know yet. I’m still figuring that out.”

There is a profound intimacy within the works, from the family albums re-photographed on linen, to the rooms of his childhood and his brother’s face captured over the years. Yet despite this, Vuong refuses to dictate how Sống should be received. “You make a work, and then it’s like you’re building a raft and sending it downriver. Well, you can’t be on that raft. You have to stay on the banks and the shore.”

Sống arrives, then, as both an archive and raft. It’s a record of a family surviving war’s long aftermath, and a vessel sent out into the world with no guarantees. It extends Vuong’s lifelong project – how to live with grief, how to see the working‑class immigrant worlds that raised him, how to turn what’s been deemed disposable into something enduring into a new medium that was there all along, teaching his sentences how to see.

Sống by Ocean Vuong is running at CPW in New York until 10 May 2026.