Updated August 12, 2026 at 1:27 PM EDT
Ocean Vuong is a MacArthur Fellowship winner and best-selling author, most recently of “The Emperor of Gladness.” But he’s also a photographer; His first solo exhibition opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, on Aug. 6.
Vuong said photography tapped his creative side in a different way than writing.
“It’s quieter. I think there’s something about writing where it’s about manifesting, bringing a kind of maximalist emotional tether, like a punk and skate culture, which I grew up in,” Vuong said “The idea was to skate your board until it snapped. To go to the punk show and the most powerful moment was when the musician would break their guitars. And I wanted the sentence to behave that way.
“But when you’re a photographer, you’re very dependent on the world. You have to meet the world where it is. And I think I want to preserve the world where it is … I want the world to come out and not manipulate it too much. So my work is much more subdued in the photographic medium.
“But what I love about photography [is that] the world must come first. The photographer comes second. Whereas if all of this blew up and we somehow made it to Mars, I could still write about Earth just by memory. But to be a photographer of Earth, I need to be on this planet. I need it to be preserved. I need it to still be here. And there’s something really beautiful about that collaborative effort between Earth and the camera that I’m really drawn to.”
The picture of his mother,seen above, was the last picture Vuong took before she died in November 2019.
“You can see she’s very gingerly propping herself up because the cancer had metastasized into her spine,” Vuong said. “So she has a lot of pain.”
Vuong’s mother was a great influence on him.
“A lot of people have commented on the boldness and innovation in my work,” Vuong added “And I don’t feel that way. I feel a lot of doubt in my work. But if there’s any credence to that, I would say I got it from the woman who raised me.”
“[This is] my brother after a 12-hour shift… and [below] here’s one of my favorite photographs. It’s my brother. You see the tear in his eye, [as he’s] biting into a McDonald’s burger. We were riding their bikes. And it was the first time I asked him about our mom. This is maybe two years after she died. I asked him, ‘Do you still dream about her?’ And then he just broke into these sobs.
“And what I learned about myself in this frame was that the photographer in me saw a better frame when he was at the height of his crying. But I didn’t take [the photo]. I told myself, I can’t live with myself if I raised the camera and took that photo and chose that aesthetically powerful moment.
“[If you’d asked me before that], I would probably have said I’m the kind of photographer that will always get the best frame. And then I had this moment, my finger was on the shutter, and I felt like if I clicked this, I’m going to regret it for a long, long time. So, I let that frame go down river. I got to take this frame because I had to be a brother first. And I’m really relieved that the moment revealed that to me.”
Vuong isn’t writing at the moment — he’s waiting for the next idea to come. But if it doesn’t, that won’t bother him, he said.
“It’s a miracle to make one book. I got to do it four times in two mediums. And I’m working on a photo book now, which, knock on wood, seems to be inevitable,” he said. “And if that’s it, gosh, what a run. I mean, that’s five books in three mediums. That’s five more books I thought I’d ever write.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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