Writer and poet Ocean Vuong began taking photographs as a teenager. With a borrowed Nikon camera in hand, he captured intimate scenes in the nail salon where his mother worked for decades and documented the post-industrial landscapes and abandoned mills of Hartford, Connecticut, where his family settled after leaving Vietnam in the wake of the US war.

Sống: Photographs by Ocean Vuong, the artist’s first New York City exhibition, foregrounds working-class diasporic Vietnamese life through a photographic archive spanning nearly twenty years. The photographs on view echo the narratives from Vuong’s literary works by drawing attention to the quotidian and the deeply personal – Vuong’s brother’s shoes, home altars, a mother feeding her baby, an embrace between friends, an American flag.

Sống, which means “to live” in Vietnamese, includes several photographs taken in the aftermath of Vuong’s mother’s death in 2019 that frame the evolving relationship with his brother, Nicky, as they mourned and navigated their immense grief. Vuong writes, “I started taking photographs as a way to make our lives legible to my mother. And my mother’s looking made the elegy legible in my work.”

One of the most celebrated American writers of our time, Vuong invites visitors to gaze through his aperture and offers a meditation on loss, labor, and kinship through the refugee condition.