This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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About the PhotographerTommy Kha is a photographer currently working between Brooklyn, New York and his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He is a recipient of the Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, and most recently named an NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow. Kha holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University. |
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Truth in Photography: It's very interesting the way you personalize the Southern experience in your work in unexpected ways. And it's interesting to me the ways in which you use self-portraiture to do that. Could you talk about the making of your Aperture book, Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter?
Tommy Kha: It's one of my only book experiences so far, so I'm very lucky to have Leslie and Alex from Studio Lin showing me the process from putting a book together to sequencing and designing. Your comments remind me how much of having to work against what has been established, being born and raised and growing up in Memphis, I didn't think much of it when I was growing up and experiencing all of that. Since I left Yale in 2013, I’ve been here in New York City, going back home to Memphis a lot to do my work, because I realized I wasn't able to do a lot of pictures up here. I guess I didn't have the mindset. Leslie is the first person to really look at everything I was working on before lockdown and the pandemic in a really critical way. I think I remember apologizing to her, “I'm so sorry, there’s so much work, no one's really shown me how to end a project.” I kept going for several years, which I'm really now thankful for because it allowed me the time where a lot of institutions weren’t giving me…not attention, there’s a lot of dismissiveness that I met. And I think part of it was because I was still maturing or trying to figure things out in my own work. In hindsight I benefited just being able to work on my own and having to rely on using a lot of personal autobiographical things, especially things I can't Google easily or find on the Internet, or find in a thrift store, or find in photographs even. To really pull from my family because it's just not found anywhere else. And in order to end up with the sequence that we had with what Leslie saw, I guess the connection to the past through the use of photography, through the use of the camera, between my mother and I as a jumping off point, and then everything else fell into place.
Tommy Kha: It's one of my only book experiences so far, so I'm very lucky to have Leslie and Alex from Studio Lin showing me the process from putting a book together to sequencing and designing. Your comments remind me how much of having to work against what has been established, being born and raised and growing up in Memphis, I didn't think much of it when I was growing up and experiencing all of that. Since I left Yale in 2013, I’ve been here in New York City, going back home to Memphis a lot to do my work, because I realized I wasn't able to do a lot of pictures up here. I guess I didn't have the mindset. Leslie is the first person to really look at everything I was working on before lockdown and the pandemic in a really critical way. I think I remember apologizing to her, “I'm so sorry, there’s so much work, no one's really shown me how to end a project.” I kept going for several years, which I'm really now thankful for because it allowed me the time where a lot of institutions weren’t giving me…not attention, there’s a lot of dismissiveness that I met. And I think part of it was because I was still maturing or trying to figure things out in my own work. In hindsight I benefited just being able to work on my own and having to rely on using a lot of personal autobiographical things, especially things I can't Google easily or find on the Internet, or find in a thrift store, or find in photographs even. To really pull from my family because it's just not found anywhere else. And in order to end up with the sequence that we had with what Leslie saw, I guess the connection to the past through the use of photography, through the use of the camera, between my mother and I as a jumping off point, and then everything else fell into place.
TiP: What made you want to be a photographer?
Kha: Oh, man. I feel like every time I try to answer it, it's never a satisfying answer. I think when I first picked up the camera, I was like, “Oh, this is really cool. I guess everyone's doing it.” So, I picked up the camera, but I didn't think anything of it. I went through several years of doing other things. I had a whole background in journalism in high school. I really went through training to be a journalist at a news station. I was doing acting classes, and doing filmmaking, and doing other things, and worked on film sets back in Memphis. I think all of it culled together, but really, I think of something really way more poignant is seeing a photograph of Sandy Skoglund. It was sometime in middle school, high school. I was at the Brooks Museum, and they had Revenge of the Goldfish. That was the first time– seeing that photograph made me realize that it was possible. I was surrounded by Christenberry, Eggleston, and to the extent of the Southern landscape genre, Sally Mann. And those are the big three that I was in the shadow of. “I don't think I can make pictures like that.” And then seeing Sandy's work, I was like, “Oh, wow,” it was possible that I could be this kind of photographer. Fast forward to my first teaching job through my painter friend Jordan Casteel at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey. I incidentally met Sandy Skoglund through that teaching post. And it was just this wonderful, weird connection, happenstance. And then, this year I ended up installing a museum piece at the Brooks Museum, in the same room where I saw Sandy Skoglun’s photograph. It's just a lot of interconnectedness. (Also, thank you to the curator Patricia Daigle!)
TiP: How old were you when you realized the potential of the camera? You grew up in the cell phone world. Was your first camera a cell phone?
Kha: No. Oh my gosh. I love that you asked me that. My first picture I can think of I made, was from a disposable camera, a Kodak, and it was in New Orleans, and it was some theater marquee that said Dead Rock City or something like that. I wish I could find that picture again. But my first camera was a Gameboy pocket camera, and it had the printer and I'm in the process of getting one. Right now, I'm going through a phase of trying to fall in love with photography again. But my first camera was a Gameboy pocket camera with the printer, receipts, and everything, and that was awesome.
TiP: Did you ever think when you first started making photographs that you wanted to document the truth of what you were seeing? It's an emotive truth. Talk a little bit about that idea of truth in photography.
Kha: That's the first thing I want to dislodge in my work, this idea that truth is easily un-affixed as one's own identity. I treat chasing my identity, or trying to make pictures about it, the same way as truth because it’s so slippery, it's so easily dislocated in the photograph. I do certain things when making photographs. I would try to put myself in a situation where I can find these pictures, without having to digitally manipulate anything, because early on I decided not to composite or Photoshop anything apart from cropping or color grading. Those are the basic things I do. I'm terrible at lighting. I like ambient light. Things that just exist as is. I think that's from my Mumblecore days in filmmaking or hanging out with a lot of filmmakers that were really into Mumblecore as a genre. I was just finding things that already existed without us having to put our hand on manipulating it. But I construct, I make cutouts, I make things from pictures, and to just pose them again and to point back at the thing that's being photographed is often the thing that's out of place, despite it being the subject matter, the protagonist. I want things to be not easy when I make photographs, and to not have the same strategy. But there is a sort of choreography, a performance between me and the camera. Me and the sitter. Between the three of us. Trying to, not necessarily locate truth, but to find the thing that is out of place, the awkward thing that doesn't really belong. And often that is in the form of my body, as a shorthand way to reflect on the things I've experienced.
Kha: Oh, man. I feel like every time I try to answer it, it's never a satisfying answer. I think when I first picked up the camera, I was like, “Oh, this is really cool. I guess everyone's doing it.” So, I picked up the camera, but I didn't think anything of it. I went through several years of doing other things. I had a whole background in journalism in high school. I really went through training to be a journalist at a news station. I was doing acting classes, and doing filmmaking, and doing other things, and worked on film sets back in Memphis. I think all of it culled together, but really, I think of something really way more poignant is seeing a photograph of Sandy Skoglund. It was sometime in middle school, high school. I was at the Brooks Museum, and they had Revenge of the Goldfish. That was the first time– seeing that photograph made me realize that it was possible. I was surrounded by Christenberry, Eggleston, and to the extent of the Southern landscape genre, Sally Mann. And those are the big three that I was in the shadow of. “I don't think I can make pictures like that.” And then seeing Sandy's work, I was like, “Oh, wow,” it was possible that I could be this kind of photographer. Fast forward to my first teaching job through my painter friend Jordan Casteel at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey. I incidentally met Sandy Skoglund through that teaching post. And it was just this wonderful, weird connection, happenstance. And then, this year I ended up installing a museum piece at the Brooks Museum, in the same room where I saw Sandy Skoglun’s photograph. It's just a lot of interconnectedness. (Also, thank you to the curator Patricia Daigle!)
TiP: How old were you when you realized the potential of the camera? You grew up in the cell phone world. Was your first camera a cell phone?
Kha: No. Oh my gosh. I love that you asked me that. My first picture I can think of I made, was from a disposable camera, a Kodak, and it was in New Orleans, and it was some theater marquee that said Dead Rock City or something like that. I wish I could find that picture again. But my first camera was a Gameboy pocket camera, and it had the printer and I'm in the process of getting one. Right now, I'm going through a phase of trying to fall in love with photography again. But my first camera was a Gameboy pocket camera with the printer, receipts, and everything, and that was awesome.
TiP: Did you ever think when you first started making photographs that you wanted to document the truth of what you were seeing? It's an emotive truth. Talk a little bit about that idea of truth in photography.
Kha: That's the first thing I want to dislodge in my work, this idea that truth is easily un-affixed as one's own identity. I treat chasing my identity, or trying to make pictures about it, the same way as truth because it’s so slippery, it's so easily dislocated in the photograph. I do certain things when making photographs. I would try to put myself in a situation where I can find these pictures, without having to digitally manipulate anything, because early on I decided not to composite or Photoshop anything apart from cropping or color grading. Those are the basic things I do. I'm terrible at lighting. I like ambient light. Things that just exist as is. I think that's from my Mumblecore days in filmmaking or hanging out with a lot of filmmakers that were really into Mumblecore as a genre. I was just finding things that already existed without us having to put our hand on manipulating it. But I construct, I make cutouts, I make things from pictures, and to just pose them again and to point back at the thing that's being photographed is often the thing that's out of place, despite it being the subject matter, the protagonist. I want things to be not easy when I make photographs, and to not have the same strategy. But there is a sort of choreography, a performance between me and the camera. Me and the sitter. Between the three of us. Trying to, not necessarily locate truth, but to find the thing that is out of place, the awkward thing that doesn't really belong. And often that is in the form of my body, as a shorthand way to reflect on the things I've experienced.
I grew up in Memphis, which has played a large role in history, certain things happened that people want to consciously talk about, then things that they don't want to talk about or not recognize. And I live with that, being a witness to those people in power and people who have been oppressed and othered. Something I ended up grasping is the responsibility of photographing in the South. How do I photograph it in a way that recognizes many of these histories and spaces that aren't often recognized, or spoken about, or given enough time to develop? And I'm really excited that the landscape is changing, the platform is changing to where a lot of people have more access to getting their work out there, getting their voices seen. But for a while, it was like, what kind of work was I making? It was easy to pose myself in front of the camera, but I didn't start out that way. I just didn't think I had anything interesting to say about myself.
TiP: So that's a deeper realization, because, ultimately, when you're putting yourself in front of your own camera, it's the pursuit of a deeper truth because you're showing something about yourself. Talk about the whole process of self-portraiture. What are you after in your self-portraits? You think of Cindy Sherman. She's doing self-portraits, but she's masked and in costume, and she's assuming the persona of others. In your photographs, it seems like you’re focused on you. The persona is you, and you're trying to convey something about yourself.
Kha: It's really me just trying to find a synonym for self-portraiture. There's not a point A to point B logic to how we arrive at our own representation. I think it's a little like Maxine Hong Kingston says, “Why must I ‘represent’ anyone besides myself?” And I really like that. There’s using my own body as a site of conflicting narratives as a result of my parents’ generation, as a result of larger historical things that have placed, and displaced, my family, who went from the other side of this world to here, and I think photography has played a little hint at that.
It's never a logical formula that I'm trying to seek. It's trying to change the way I approach arriving at myself, but knowing that every picture is always a photograph of myself in the immediate past. There's no going back. Even thinking on a scientific scale is that the first organ that forms in the womb is the eyes. And we shed cells every day and reform them. Maybe it's a ship of Theseus. What is original? Who ultimately is this person I'm trying to portray? But it's hard to do that when we change costumes, change props, change the medium, change cameras, change cast members even, change makeup, hair. I like to think of Cindy Sherman, but I think of Adrian Piper, or Claude Cahun, or Tseng Kwong Chi. I think Tseng Kwong Chi’s probably the easiest predecessor I have of performing for the camera and using the body as this questioning of not performing the self, but playing this character, and at the same time talking about the division between West and East. It's such a simplistic approach, but there's not a lot of an artist family tree I can draw from. I think it's also indicative of where we are, of all of these things in play. There's always something that I want to rephrase when I make pictures.
TiP: So that's a deeper realization, because, ultimately, when you're putting yourself in front of your own camera, it's the pursuit of a deeper truth because you're showing something about yourself. Talk about the whole process of self-portraiture. What are you after in your self-portraits? You think of Cindy Sherman. She's doing self-portraits, but she's masked and in costume, and she's assuming the persona of others. In your photographs, it seems like you’re focused on you. The persona is you, and you're trying to convey something about yourself.
Kha: It's really me just trying to find a synonym for self-portraiture. There's not a point A to point B logic to how we arrive at our own representation. I think it's a little like Maxine Hong Kingston says, “Why must I ‘represent’ anyone besides myself?” And I really like that. There’s using my own body as a site of conflicting narratives as a result of my parents’ generation, as a result of larger historical things that have placed, and displaced, my family, who went from the other side of this world to here, and I think photography has played a little hint at that.
It's never a logical formula that I'm trying to seek. It's trying to change the way I approach arriving at myself, but knowing that every picture is always a photograph of myself in the immediate past. There's no going back. Even thinking on a scientific scale is that the first organ that forms in the womb is the eyes. And we shed cells every day and reform them. Maybe it's a ship of Theseus. What is original? Who ultimately is this person I'm trying to portray? But it's hard to do that when we change costumes, change props, change the medium, change cameras, change cast members even, change makeup, hair. I like to think of Cindy Sherman, but I think of Adrian Piper, or Claude Cahun, or Tseng Kwong Chi. I think Tseng Kwong Chi’s probably the easiest predecessor I have of performing for the camera and using the body as this questioning of not performing the self, but playing this character, and at the same time talking about the division between West and East. It's such a simplistic approach, but there's not a lot of an artist family tree I can draw from. I think it's also indicative of where we are, of all of these things in play. There's always something that I want to rephrase when I make pictures.
TiP: Could you complete the sentence, truth in photography is?
Kha: I’m gonna say slippery.
TiP: How is it slippery? That's a very strong metaphor.
Kha: Recently people were asking me how I feel about my work being out there in the world, and it's not that different. I really appreciate and am grateful for the people interested in looking at all. But a lot of times I think about artists’ intentionalities, and that's ultimately what we can control. And putting it out there, it's a slippery slope because truth is really how the artist intends to interpret it. For me, it's treating it like it exists and can easily be misconstrued. But something I want to appear in my photography is that you can see the seams, you can see the breakage, you can see the magic of photography break apart, fall apart on itself. That's the truth I would like to see a bit more. That's the intention that I want, and I love being able to share it with people because all of us have unique experiences. Putting work on the wall and having other people spend their time looking at it provides this other piece of the puzzle. Truth shifts and becomes something else for another person, and I think that's an amazing thing I would just be grateful for, and I hope for that to happen.
TiP: What's the relationship between your self-portraiture and what you would say is a Southern aesthetic? People look at your work and they think about aspects of the South. What's the relationship in your mind? Or is that just pigeonholing you into an identity that maybe you don't have?
Kha: I think it's less about my body and it's really about the spaces entirely. The South is a backdrop to many of my photographs, if not all, because I go back and forth. A lot of my pictures are a result of traveling for work and going back home. I think Alex Link has said, the American South is something to be misremembered, and then he proceeded to talk about how people treat it as a thing of the past. It's nostalgia. It’s sentimentality. It's definitely these things, but often it's seen to be something to be of the past. And I often think photography is actually that. The camera itself is an apparatus that any of the images it captures is of the immediate past. It’s time traveling. It's literally a weird way of looking at the past. So, I've been really influenced by the idea of how the past does manifest in ways through photographs.
Often I find it through preservation, or sites that are preserved. The easy thing I can think of is Sun Studios, the Southern signage marquees that are still falling apart, but are part of the architecture of the South. As much as it is changing and progressing, it's also like a palimpsest, the idea that you're writing things over, erasing this page, and writing new text on top of it. And doesn't that sound like the body itself, too? And there's a lot of correlation to that, to photography, to the past, these practices, these antiquated practices. We're still doing it now, the act of looking through a glass to look at the world that's already a cut out, a readymade cut out of the world. We're always trying to find new ways to look at it, to look at the world. I'm really happy to be at this spot. I don't think the people who were finding out photography would imagine people of color, queer people behind the lens, have something to say and add on to it.
Kha: I’m gonna say slippery.
TiP: How is it slippery? That's a very strong metaphor.
Kha: Recently people were asking me how I feel about my work being out there in the world, and it's not that different. I really appreciate and am grateful for the people interested in looking at all. But a lot of times I think about artists’ intentionalities, and that's ultimately what we can control. And putting it out there, it's a slippery slope because truth is really how the artist intends to interpret it. For me, it's treating it like it exists and can easily be misconstrued. But something I want to appear in my photography is that you can see the seams, you can see the breakage, you can see the magic of photography break apart, fall apart on itself. That's the truth I would like to see a bit more. That's the intention that I want, and I love being able to share it with people because all of us have unique experiences. Putting work on the wall and having other people spend their time looking at it provides this other piece of the puzzle. Truth shifts and becomes something else for another person, and I think that's an amazing thing I would just be grateful for, and I hope for that to happen.
TiP: What's the relationship between your self-portraiture and what you would say is a Southern aesthetic? People look at your work and they think about aspects of the South. What's the relationship in your mind? Or is that just pigeonholing you into an identity that maybe you don't have?
Kha: I think it's less about my body and it's really about the spaces entirely. The South is a backdrop to many of my photographs, if not all, because I go back and forth. A lot of my pictures are a result of traveling for work and going back home. I think Alex Link has said, the American South is something to be misremembered, and then he proceeded to talk about how people treat it as a thing of the past. It's nostalgia. It’s sentimentality. It's definitely these things, but often it's seen to be something to be of the past. And I often think photography is actually that. The camera itself is an apparatus that any of the images it captures is of the immediate past. It’s time traveling. It's literally a weird way of looking at the past. So, I've been really influenced by the idea of how the past does manifest in ways through photographs.
Often I find it through preservation, or sites that are preserved. The easy thing I can think of is Sun Studios, the Southern signage marquees that are still falling apart, but are part of the architecture of the South. As much as it is changing and progressing, it's also like a palimpsest, the idea that you're writing things over, erasing this page, and writing new text on top of it. And doesn't that sound like the body itself, too? And there's a lot of correlation to that, to photography, to the past, these practices, these antiquated practices. We're still doing it now, the act of looking through a glass to look at the world that's already a cut out, a readymade cut out of the world. We're always trying to find new ways to look at it, to look at the world. I'm really happy to be at this spot. I don't think the people who were finding out photography would imagine people of color, queer people behind the lens, have something to say and add on to it.
TiP: How do you feel your Asian identity comes through in your work?
Kha: When I started to make pictures, I really actively avoided making work about being Asian. I did the exhibit Return to Sender as a result, my first foray into self-portraiture, bridging performance, and I really love that that's the start of it, that really have to do with my Asian identity. But when those pictures got released, there was a conversation about perpetuating Asian male stereotypes at the time, in regards to Hollywood. When I made those pictures 13 years ago, people weren't talking about that. We didn’t have Glenn on The Walking Dead shooting zombies. It was an active avoidment, but those conversations ended up coming back in later on, whether I wanted to or not.
TiP: A lot of your photographs focus on your face, and I think through that, it's showing, not telling. But there's something gestural about your face and the gestures that you make. Do you feel that?
Kha: I think so. It wasn't as intentional, but something that came out of developing, my observations of the deadpan face, that character does show up a lot, where I just don't show emotion, the stoic-ness. And honestly, that was just something we were reading about in school, the time that people took to sit in front of the camera in the early days of studio photography was often 30 minutes, or an hour, or several hours. And you know, people used to sit for paintings.
Kha: When I started to make pictures, I really actively avoided making work about being Asian. I did the exhibit Return to Sender as a result, my first foray into self-portraiture, bridging performance, and I really love that that's the start of it, that really have to do with my Asian identity. But when those pictures got released, there was a conversation about perpetuating Asian male stereotypes at the time, in regards to Hollywood. When I made those pictures 13 years ago, people weren't talking about that. We didn’t have Glenn on The Walking Dead shooting zombies. It was an active avoidment, but those conversations ended up coming back in later on, whether I wanted to or not.
TiP: A lot of your photographs focus on your face, and I think through that, it's showing, not telling. But there's something gestural about your face and the gestures that you make. Do you feel that?
Kha: I think so. It wasn't as intentional, but something that came out of developing, my observations of the deadpan face, that character does show up a lot, where I just don't show emotion, the stoic-ness. And honestly, that was just something we were reading about in school, the time that people took to sit in front of the camera in the early days of studio photography was often 30 minutes, or an hour, or several hours. And you know, people used to sit for paintings.
TiP: What is truth, ultimately? How do you determine what's truthful? Whether it's a photograph or a conversation, it’s based on our perception.
Kha: The same image changes depending on who's looking at it. And I feel the same way when people interact with me and have different ways of treating me each time, through different levels of familiarity. I feel that repeats itself in the picture making process. How we image each other, how do we give respect to each other when we photograph each other? What's the level of commitment and space and time that we spend on a building photographing it compared to a person that we are photographing? Is it given the same considerations? That's what I just like to think about. There's not great straightforward answers, and I think that's why I keep going, or changing strategies every time. I run through several materials and props and redo them constantly, because time has changed. Or I look at things differently and hope that collapsing those spaces between leads to interesting connections to our past.
TiP: How do you select your props and what's the purpose of the props?
Kha: I’m still making cutouts of myself, because I think that there are new things I can't really understand myself, even through photographing myself constantly and updating that. So, I have a lot of cardboard cutouts of myself with various hairstyles. I don't use age or numbers; I just go by hairstyles now. And now I have pillows of myself to see if that changes anything from a flat material to a more three dimensional object that's made from pictures. Right now, I'm still doing those kinds of cutouts of myself, but since lockdown I've been really incorporating collage techniques, and since I've already been making cutouts of myself, it stands to reason that I could cut out other objects that I photographed. At a time where we're in lockdown, a lot of us went through our archives to glean anything. I realized I could cut things out from the backgrounds I'd never considered before, that were not straightforward subject matter, and started making new kinds of cutouts, which has been a lot of how I've been making these props. Technology's involved, so I've been trying to update my way of making these props. Something from theater, from plaster casting, to taking pictures of myself and allowing the computer to render me. Then having a surgical camera to make an accurate image of me so I can create 3D printed masks. So often it's just either updating it because I think the image changed, so I have to change. I'm in the state of collecting them. I'm not ready to make a picture. I have started to make those pictures, but nothing solid. I hope to just collapse all those past pictures together to be this one soft collage. But that is a photograph of all these pictures I've made in the past, collapsed into one singular picture. I just want to see what it looks like. All this work might not work out, but I just want to see this process through.
TiP: I think the joy of being an artist is always in the making and the way in which we engage with that process. Seeing the world in different media reveals different truths.
Kha: I kind of like the lack of completeness to it. At the same time, I think it's ended up being like, “Oh well, there's definitely a piece of the puzzle that's missing.” I don't mind when I arrive at that experience. I think it's just the irony of things like, “Yeah, we don't all have it together,” you know? And I think that's the beauty of photography. You’re just filling in one part of the puzzle and everyone else is filling in the gaps as well. And it's still wonderful to exist in that space.
Kha: The same image changes depending on who's looking at it. And I feel the same way when people interact with me and have different ways of treating me each time, through different levels of familiarity. I feel that repeats itself in the picture making process. How we image each other, how do we give respect to each other when we photograph each other? What's the level of commitment and space and time that we spend on a building photographing it compared to a person that we are photographing? Is it given the same considerations? That's what I just like to think about. There's not great straightforward answers, and I think that's why I keep going, or changing strategies every time. I run through several materials and props and redo them constantly, because time has changed. Or I look at things differently and hope that collapsing those spaces between leads to interesting connections to our past.
TiP: How do you select your props and what's the purpose of the props?
Kha: I’m still making cutouts of myself, because I think that there are new things I can't really understand myself, even through photographing myself constantly and updating that. So, I have a lot of cardboard cutouts of myself with various hairstyles. I don't use age or numbers; I just go by hairstyles now. And now I have pillows of myself to see if that changes anything from a flat material to a more three dimensional object that's made from pictures. Right now, I'm still doing those kinds of cutouts of myself, but since lockdown I've been really incorporating collage techniques, and since I've already been making cutouts of myself, it stands to reason that I could cut out other objects that I photographed. At a time where we're in lockdown, a lot of us went through our archives to glean anything. I realized I could cut things out from the backgrounds I'd never considered before, that were not straightforward subject matter, and started making new kinds of cutouts, which has been a lot of how I've been making these props. Technology's involved, so I've been trying to update my way of making these props. Something from theater, from plaster casting, to taking pictures of myself and allowing the computer to render me. Then having a surgical camera to make an accurate image of me so I can create 3D printed masks. So often it's just either updating it because I think the image changed, so I have to change. I'm in the state of collecting them. I'm not ready to make a picture. I have started to make those pictures, but nothing solid. I hope to just collapse all those past pictures together to be this one soft collage. But that is a photograph of all these pictures I've made in the past, collapsed into one singular picture. I just want to see what it looks like. All this work might not work out, but I just want to see this process through.
TiP: I think the joy of being an artist is always in the making and the way in which we engage with that process. Seeing the world in different media reveals different truths.
Kha: I kind of like the lack of completeness to it. At the same time, I think it's ended up being like, “Oh well, there's definitely a piece of the puzzle that's missing.” I don't mind when I arrive at that experience. I think it's just the irony of things like, “Yeah, we don't all have it together,” you know? And I think that's the beauty of photography. You’re just filling in one part of the puzzle and everyone else is filling in the gaps as well. And it's still wonderful to exist in that space.
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