forthcoming book
‘my backyard’
seattle, washington 2015-2016
‘my backyard’
seattle, washington 2015-2016
Foreword
Three dollars. That’s how much it cost the creator of the book you’re holding to buy a bowl of organic rice and beans when he was living out of his car in Seattle ten years ago. He subsisted on these staples but would also add polyphenols to his diet (and exploit a rare loophole in the fabric of our rapaciously capitalistic society) by dousing his bowl in extra virgin olive oil from the countertop. I confess that, as he was telling me about these happenings, the first question that popped into my mind was “where can you even get a deal like that today??” Such are the trappings of what Dave Hickey would immediately recognize as the life of a pirate, and my good friend Thomas Tran lives it to the fullest.
All jokes aside, this very special collection of impressions draws its appeal from a unique combination of playful mischief, curiosity, innocence, and boldness; at the time he created it, Thomas felt the compulsion to see the world for himself for the first time in his life, unmediated by the usual channels of cable TV or internet reporting. This is an artistic impetus as old as time, and yet he succeeds in creating something new and fresh by sheer power of his sincerity. Taking his almost photojournalistic bent to its logical conclusion yields remarkable results; in images portraying news crews in action and a man taking photos of his companions, for example, he lays bare a world that includes themeta-workings of media and photography.
But there’s much more than that; Thomas is a chronicler of a remarkably wide slice of the human condition. His photos explore the complications and contradictions inherent in our by turns glamorous, seedy, serious, and silly society. They provide answers, in a wordless language, to questions that, as the writer David Foster Wallace once explained in a TV interview, are very hard to talk about directly. To see this, I recommend you to the cheeky back-of-the-head portrait of a hairstyle devotee visiting his shrine in a pharmacy aisle.
Thomas’ instinct to worm his way into how society’s various sausages get made (oftentimes, transgressively) characterizes the whole project and, when the subjects come from the underbelly of society, gives it a feel that echoes the early-20th-century work of Jacob Riis. Like Riis’s, his work here is direct, unflinching, brutally honest, willing to illuminate anything and everything (I, for one, could not believe that my college dorm and Section 8 housing had the same furniture!) And yet, despite the rawness at the core of his practice, I know firsthand from observation that he takes care to wrap every thing and person inside and outside of the frame with tender affection. It’s quite a combination of feats.
Each image succeeds on a purely aesthetic level while exploring an interesting conceptual theme. Some of these themes include the nature of kinship and how the way a body occupies space expresses its particular human identity. We see dualities including grief and bliss, attention and distraction, authority and subjection, reticence and engagement, freedom and constraint, composure and contortion, self-consciousness and shamelessness, innocence and world-weariness. The contortions are associated with a kind of absurdist humor. You can tell a lot about someone in how they react to being unexpectedly photographed, especially if they don’t notice it. In any case, the visual language includes a tasteful spareness — just enough simplicity in the background to highlight differences in the foreground — that helps highlight these opposites.
Several images focus on the vulnerable in-between state of being lost and discombobulated — figures struggling to get a foothold on the present, to regain their balance. In one photo, a hunched-over man stands stuck in the exigency of the moment, groping around for his fallen red-and-white walking stick, close at hand yet elusive. Literal blindness might serve as a doorway to the metaphorical; more than just a stick, he is trying, if ineffectually, to find his direction in life. There’s something touching, moving even, about these figures groping in the dark to try and stabilize themselves. Our vantage point and station in life may be different, but perhaps we can see a bit of ourselves in them. They are like us, every bit as human and worthy of an interested gaze.
Perhaps more than anything, this book of photographs is a testament to what the pioneering meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has called “a quality of attention that’s sensitive to things that might normally be overlooked.” The images are meditations themselves, the artist’s spark of joy in the everyday and the ordinary gleaming brightly through. I need only look at the pure-hearted curiosity of the children he photographed jumping up on their fence to get a better view of the street. He reveals to us, one still at a time, that he has not lost what they have. It’s their backyard and his, too.
— Dylan Rothman
New York, 2025