©Ocean Vuong, American Brothers, 2024⁠

Over the past few months, while driving through Los Angeles, I’ve been listening to Ocean Vuong read his extraordinary novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. His language carries an emotional force and there is tenderness in the way he writes the story as a letter from a son, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother. The book traces the fractures of family history from Vietnam to immigrant life in America. But it is not only the words themselves that move me; it is the sound of his voice. The cadence and intimacy of his reading fill me with a particular melancholy, an ache born from witnessing the world through profound sensitivity to the human experience.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to discover that he is now bringing those same sensibilities to photography.

CENTER Santa Fe will open Ocean Vuong’s exhibition, Sống, on May 29th, running through June 28, 2026. The exhibition title, Sống, translates from Vietnamese as “to live.” The heart of the exhibition is a series of photographs of Vuong’s younger brother, captured as the two navigated grief, care, and renewal following their mother’s death. Sống invites viewers into a portrait of family, labor, and identity with images ranging from the vibrant fluorescent lights of nail salons to quiet, domestic interiors.

©Ocean Vuong, Nicky on Mill River (i), 2024, Inkjet print, 24 x 18 inches

CENTER shares:

Award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist Ocean Vuong has emerged as a defining voice of his generation. With Sống, Vuong extends his deeply personal vision beyond the written word, drawing upon the intergenerational experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora.

In Vietnamese, Sống translates to “to live”—a vital affirmation of survival in the wake of conflict. Through these photographs, Vuong deconstructs traditional depictions of the working class, offering instead an intimate lens that honors the labor, autonomy, and quiet dignity of those often rendered invisible. The images function as a visual companion to his literary explorations of memory and grief, particularly in the years following his mother’s death. Here, survival is captured not as a singular event, but as an ongoing, daily practice.

Shaped by the transgenerational trauma of the American War in Vietnam, Vuong’s long-standing photographic practice serves as a living archive. The work reveals that the diasporic condition is not a static state of displacement, but a dynamic, creative process of world-building. Sống is an invitation to move beyond mere witnessing and into a shared condition of feeling, existing, and living.

©Ocean Vuong

©Ocean Vuong

Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The NewEngland Book Award. The novel debuted for six  weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 41 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the author of the poetry collections, Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award. Selected by Time magazine as one of its 100 Rising Cultural Influencers, Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working-class family of nail salon and factory laborers. He graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature and subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU. Vuong currently splits his time between Western Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.

Instagram: @ocean_vuong

©Ocean Vuong, Nicky and Ocean, 2025 Inkjet print 18 x 24 inches

©Ocean Vuong, Rose and Phuong (i), 2009 Inkjet print 12 x 8 inches

©Ocean Vuong, pedicures, 2009 Inkjet print 8 x 12 inches

©Ocean Vuong, Nicky after 12-hour shift, 2025 Inkjet print 20 x 15 inches

©Ocean Vuong, Nicky after quitting Target, 2024 Inkjet print 18 x 24 inches

©Ocean Vuong

About CENTER:

Founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1994, the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization CENTER supports social and environmentally-engaged lens-based projects through education, public platforms, funding, and partnerships.

Through our advancement of artists and their work, CENTER serves to deepen public understanding of lens-based media’s history and ongoing cultural significance. By establishing partnerships between artists and scholars, editors, students, and the art world, we advance projects that respect all people, open minds, and engage our shared humanity.

Characterized by a community of gifted and committed photographers, CENTER provides platforms to create and share visual stories. Public exhibitions, presentations, and expositions showcase all types of photographic projects. Annual programs include the Project Launch Grant, Project Development Grant, Me&Eve Award, The CENTER Awards, The Visual Storytelling Lab for NM Military, Callanan Excellence in Teaching Award, Jay and Susie Tyrrell Excellence in Works by Hand Award, Blue Earth Fiscal Sponsorship, The Democratic Lens: Photography and Civic Engagement lecture series, and the Review Santa Fe Photo Symposium.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, is located in the ancestral and unceded traditional territories of the Tewa people, who continue to maintain connections to this land. Thousands of years ago, O’ghe P’oghe – the original Tewa name for Santa Fe, which means White Shell, Water Place – was a center place for Northern and Southern Tewa communities. We honor the Tewa people of the past, present, and future who inhabit, hold sacred, and steward this land.

Sponsors
CENTER’s programs are generously supported by: New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, New Mexico Humanities Council, the City of Santa Fe Arts & Culture Department, the 1% Lodgers’ Tax, Santa Fe County, special friends, donors, members, Board of Directors, and staff who help us to fulfill our mission.