Forthcoming Book
‘My Backyard’
Seattle, Washington 2015-2016
‘My Backyard’
Seattle, Washington 2015-2016
Foreword
Three dollars. That’s how much it cost ten years ago for the creator of the book you’re now holding to buy a bowl of organic rice and beans. At the time, Thomas Tran was living out of his car in Seattle. While subsisting on these staples, he would typically add polyphenols to his diet (and exploit a rare loophole in the fabric of our rapaciously capitalistic society) by dousing his bowl with a complimentary bottle of extra virgin olive oil sitting on 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??” But then, his are the trappings of what Dave Hickey would immediately recognize as the life of a pirate, lived 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, Tran felt for the first time in his life the compulsion to see the world for himself, 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 fresh by sheer power of sincerity. Taking his almost photojournalistic bent to its logical conclusion yields remarkable results; in images portraying news crews in action and a man taking photosof his female companions, for example, he lays bare a world that includes the meta-workings of media and photography.
But there’s much more than that; Tran is a veritable 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 during a German TV interview, are very hard to talk about directly. To see what I’m talking about, I recommend you to the cheeky back-of-the-head portrait of a hairstyle devotee visiting his pharmacy aisle shrine.
Tran’s instinct to worm his way into the easily-overlooked places where society’s sausages get made suffuses 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 social reformer and photographer Jacob Riis. Like Riis’s, his work here is direct, unflinching, brutally honest, and willing to illuminate anything and everything (I have been enlightened to the effect that my college dorm room and Section 8 housing have the same furniture! Wow!) And yet, despite the rawness at the core of Tran’s practice, I know firsthand from observing him in the field that he takes great care to wrap every thing and person inside and outside of the frame with tender affection.
Each image succeeds on a purely aesthetic level and many explore interesting conceptual themes. Some of these include the nature of kinship and how the way a body occupiesspace expresses its particular human identity. We see a wide range of dualities: 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 visual language tends to include a tasteful spareness — just enough simplicity in the background to avoid competing with 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. Here, literal blindness might serve as a doorway to the metaphorical; more than just the stick, he is, if ineffectually, trying to find his direction in life. There’s something moving,then, 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, human and worthy of an interested gaze.
Perhaps more than anything, Tran’s work 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 — visual odes to ordinary subjects worthy of delight. I need only look at the pure-hearted curiosity of the children Tran photographs 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. After all, it’s not only their backyard but his, too.
— Dylan Rothman
New York, 2025