PHOTOGRAPHER TOMMY KHA
here I am.
Tommy Kha is a left-handed, Queer, Asian American photographer from Memphis, Tennessee, who is, in his own words, not supposed to exist. His work documents his family's journey from Vietnam through Canada to the American South through self-portraits, cutouts, and his mother's own photographs. He takes after his great-aunt, who, he's told, read too many books and went crazy. She was also adopted.
When Tommy began taking photographs, he was inspired by the work of Nan Goldin to document his friends, many of them performers and musicians, as they made their racket around town. To better pull focus for his self-portraits, he toted around an Elvis cutout. Over time, inspired in part by Claude Cahun, Reka Reisinger, and Tseng Kwong Chi, he began incorporating the cutouts themselves, producing a different kind of self-representation. These self-portraits dramatize his sense of dislocation: of not belonging, maybe even invading, or judging, these scenes of pure Americana. He experimented with printing his face on pillows or puzzles so that he was, quite literally, fragmented.
- Tea with Brit Marling, and then I make her picture.
- A gin and tonic with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and then I make her picture.
- A seltzer with Miranda July and Sophie Calle, and then I make their pictures.
Tommy Kha My creative process lately has involved the ideas of outsourcing and time-travelling through my personal archives, both artifacts of the pandemic. I've been physically deconstructing my pictures by cutting them up for parts, and reconfiguring them in a studio space to be rephotographed and recycled. A recent studio visit, we drew the conclusion of photographs as currency, as exchange, via the souvenir and gift shop. So I've been transforming my work into puzzles, 35mm slides, lenticular, and takeaways. We always want to remember something we've left behind.
"We always want to remember something we've left behind."
Tommy KhaTommy Kha Our mirrors, ourselves. Not that I agree with what I see. I am a piece of work though.
Tommy Kha No matter how much we reconfigure ourselves in our spaces, there's always room for improvement. The art world isn't different. I look forward to when the world is reflective of itself. In short: more women, more BIPOC, more Indigenous People, more queers, more trans stories.
In his debut monograph Half, Full, Quarter (Aperture), Tommy's layered portraits, still lifes, and landscapes exist alongside his mother's own photographs. She gifted him a photo album of pictures she made when she first arrived in Canada from Vietnam in the 1980s, before she eventually settled in Memphis, where Tommy was born. He didn't realise until five years into their collaboration that she was an imagemaker herself.
My mom's work came out of celebration and an extension of survival. Her photographs are the kind of thing that most people have in their family's archives, pictures of birthdays and get-togethers that are markers of their existence. They made it this far and it's worthy of commemoration and remembrance. When putting our photos together, I realised that the things my mom photographed, even in incidental snapshots, also appear in my work: obscured faces in self-portraits, flowers, bodies of water, funny facial expressions.
I can't trace my family history past the 1930s. I don't have all the pieces, and there are things I can't even put words to. In 2019, I started photographing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese restaurants in the Mississippi Delta and Memphis region. Growing up, I didn't see another Asian person who wasn't related to me for a very long time. I'm choosing to map, archive, and retell histories.
Studio shots Andrew Kim / International Studio and Curatorial Program (https://iscp-nyc.org).