How to Take a Queer Photograph
2024–2025
2024–2025
As Vietnam grinds its gears towards becoming a developed nation, its LGBTQ+ community is not criminalized and generally tolerated. However, between lacking foundational legal recognitions and the recent rise of chauvinism along with Western far-right influences, queer Vietnamese people struggle to navigate life as we become entangled with the country’s nation-building process. In public consciousness, we continue to be understood and depicted as a hedonistic, perverse, disease-ridden, and reactionary population. This series of photographs is our bodies’ response.
Ben and I, two queer visual artists, are close friends and frequent collaborators. This project started with Ben asking to take a photo of me when we first became friends three years ago and culminated with me asking Ben to teach me self-photography. We see this project as a space for mutual trust and intimate expression of our creativity and lived experiences. As we travel together and take photos that reflect our close understanding of each other, we complicate the idea of photography as a passive medium of communication and its voyeuristic gaze, together disrupting traditional practices of photographic authorship, authority, and representation.
This project also emphasizes the experience of queer migration. We both grew up in the countryside of Central Vietnam. In recent years in Vietnam, there has been an echoing sentiment between young people, especially those that left their hometown to work in a big city, that one should just quit their 9-5 and return to their countryside hometown to live a quiet, simple life of farming and being near their family. However, as queers that experienced abuse and discrimination from their families and relatives, we do not have that luxury. These photos see us moving between different regions to find a place to call home, maneuvering between the extreme communal proximity of our rural coming-of-age and the liberation we found in cosmopolitan Saigon and in each other.
Ben and I, two queer visual artists, are close friends and frequent collaborators. This project started with Ben asking to take a photo of me when we first became friends three years ago and culminated with me asking Ben to teach me self-photography. We see this project as a space for mutual trust and intimate expression of our creativity and lived experiences. As we travel together and take photos that reflect our close understanding of each other, we complicate the idea of photography as a passive medium of communication and its voyeuristic gaze, together disrupting traditional practices of photographic authorship, authority, and representation.
This project also emphasizes the experience of queer migration. We both grew up in the countryside of Central Vietnam. In recent years in Vietnam, there has been an echoing sentiment between young people, especially those that left their hometown to work in a big city, that one should just quit their 9-5 and return to their countryside hometown to live a quiet, simple life of farming and being near their family. However, as queers that experienced abuse and discrimination from their families and relatives, we do not have that luxury. These photos see us moving between different regions to find a place to call home, maneuvering between the extreme communal proximity of our rural coming-of-age and the liberation we found in cosmopolitan Saigon and in each other.