Witness
Word
Image
I was born in Ninh Hoa, Khánh Hòa, Vietnam, and came to New Orleans at five years old, young enough that the city became my first language. New Orleans leads with its soul and wears its heart openly, and growing up inside that taught me to pay attention differently. To move through the world with a kind of surreal tenderness. To understand that the quiet moments, a prayer, an exhale, something small and fleeting that most people walk past, are often where the most truth lives.
Maybe that is why I have always been drawn to flowers. They are beautiful because they are temporary, and somewhere in that impermanence is why I first picked up a camera. Not to stop time. To honor it.
My mother is a florist. My father was a soldier who wrote poetry. I grew up watching him hold both of those things without explanation, without apology, and it never left me. It lives in who I photograph and how I photograph them. I am always looking for the full person, the tender and the strong occupying the same body, the same breath. That is what moves me. That is what I am still learning to give myself permission to be.
For a long time I kept myself in separate rooms, the photographer, the poet, the man of faith, as if wholeness was something to be earned later. Breaking my arm broke that open. In the stillness of healing I stopped fragmenting myself and let everything speak in the same voice. The images and the words. The sacred and the everyday. I make things because I am still learning how to be whole, and I have learned that honesty shown publicly has a way of finding people who are quietly doing the same work on themselves.
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