PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf - Photography Podcast

Ocean Vuong on Pursuing a Creative Life in Photography & Art - Episode 105

9 snips

Feb 5, 2026

Ocean Vuong, poet, novelist, teacher, and photographer known for exploring memory and family, discusses his photography exhibition and photobook. He talks about discovering photographers, how photographing his neighborhood shaped his work, the discipline of editing and sequencing, and blending poetry with images. Conversations touch on vulnerability, collaboration, and following curiosity across mediums.

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ANECDOTE

From Punk Shows To Photographic Discovery

Ocean Vuong describes discovering photography after shooting punk shows with a borrowed Nikon D40 and seeing frames transform the world for him.
He learned from tiny library sections and photographers like Moriyama and Killip that photography felt like punching holes out of time.

ANECDOTE

A Mother's Critique Shaped His Eye

Ocean printed neighborhood photos at CVS to show his illiterate mother where they lived and received her blunt critique that the images felt "so sad."
Her reaction introduced him to the Vietnamese sense of 'buông' and shaped his lifelong photographic obsession.

INSIGHT

Photography Deepens Writing Memory

Vuong explains that making strong photographs deepened his embodied knowledge and improved his writing's cinematic detail.
The camera embeds subjects into memory differently than snapshots and enriches prose description.

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Ocean Vuong, poet, essayist, novelist, educator, and photographer, joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf for an in-depth conversation about his solo photography exhibition Sõng and the accompanying photobook, presented at CPW. In this episode, Vuong reflects on storytelling across mediums, creative practice, and the discipline behind writing and photography. Drawing from his life experience, he speaks candidly about process, vulnerability, and the courage required to share work publicly. This episode offers grounded insight for artists who question their creative voice or the value of presenting their work.

https://www.oceanvuong.com/

https://cpw.org/exhibition/song/

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 New England 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, Granta, 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 was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.

He 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.