Luther Konadu and Pao Houa Her in Conversation

The first photo I remember seeing of Pao Houa Her’s was an isolated jpeg from her exhibition “My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger”. I wondered what it was a still of. It brought to mind the grace of Christian Berger’s cinematography work on The White Ribbon. If I recall clearly, there wasn’t much talking in that feature—only a few moments where there’s abrupt sound or movement. Edits from scene to scene were never compulsive or sudden; we see still moments that continue for stretches of time. We see portrait shots of characters, and it’s as though we are sharing the same space, but they appear to be in a far dreamier and languid place than us. I felt this same sensibility with Her’s image. The photo centres on three older male figures, standing together, clad in suits, all gazing out towards us. The man in the middle is the most casual and likely the youngest. It’s as if they paused on their way to some formal function or were perhaps just leaving. The floral arrangement draping down on them suggests it could be a wedding or a similar event. After more time with the photo, I see the fourth figure in the background—almost like an extra lost in a scene. They’re mingling with the hanging florals of the background. I’m curious about where this scene is going, but Her’s image is and will remain an incomplete fragment, one that appears to slip between staged and a found moment.

Her has a knack for creating worlds in her photos, however off-the-cuff or elaborately contracted they appear. As a photographer, Her is a chameleon. She maximizes her flexibility from frame to frame. You can find photos of Her’s that play into the tropes of self-portraiture, official veteran portraits, still life, theatrical set designed tableaux, observational documentary capture, inconsequential scenes, studio photography, digital manipulation, collage, landscape and nature photography. No two Her photos are ever alike. They feel highly considered and deliberate. In the way poetry keeps plot points out of the frame, her images are elusive and timeless. If there’s backstory, it never eclipses the viewing of the work. There’s an intimacy to her images that at times feels like you are intruding on a private conversation. She keeps viewers aware that they are voyeurs.

At the crux of Her’s work is her Hmong community; those immediate to her in Minnesota (where she resides) and those in Laos. Her’s photos become a personal archive of her people. They are layered with histories, myth, fantasy, flamboyance, and curveballs. She shows us generously but never confides in us enough to show us everything, even what she reveals in plain sight. As much as Her offers particulars related to the Hmong community, she does so with an acute critical distance—she includes the good next to the bad.  It is simultaneously in that world and outside—zoomed out to self-analyze.

I was drawn to Her’s work because, collectively, I hadn’t seen work like it before.  In our conversation, she talked about audiences’ relatability to the work. As one unfamiliar to her community prior to discovering her work, I found recognition. I found the ample room she leaves unfilled for onlookers to insert individual subjectivities. Although I may never know the nuances of the community she’s a part of, I found that her work isn’t a one-way conversation; rather, it’s primed for an open dialogue.

Luther Konadu: As someone who documents their community, is it your intention to present it in a good light, or are you also looking for other things: things that aren’t talked about, things that are critical? And if that’s the case, then  how do you do both?

Pao Houa Her: I am really interested in our history with America. Like our fascination with America; fascination with whiteness, our colonizers and how those fascinations permeate the American discourse. Like the idea of Hmong veterans not being recognized by the United States military, or how they had to buy their own uniforms and insert themselves into a history that has all but forgotten about them. Or this desire to want to go back and live in Laos so much so that Hmong elders are okay with being swindled by other Hmong people. And so, I am interested in history as much as current issues or current events.

LK: The Hmong community is such a small community and any small thing can be used as a defining characteristic for the entirety of that group. So you presenting these images on a macro level can be a defining factor for how others see you. If you’re talking about histories, criticism of those histories, and placing an observational eye on the community, how are you able to tiptoe the positive then also reveal the darker aspects without having the negative outweigh the positive?

PHH: Yeah, that’s a good question. The conversations that I want to have are hard conversations. They are conversations that aren’t happening in the Hmong community because these issues feel like they should be insular. There’s a saying in the Hmong community: the English translation is “don’t peel your eggs because then the world is going to see what is inside of your egg so don’t peel your egg.” I think that for a long time that’s been that motto. We don’t talk about our issues. I’m always curious as to how we can break those models or how we can break those barriers. How do we make things so that they are accessible, so that we can have conversations about it? It’s doubly hard; one, because I am a woman, and a woman in the Hmong community making critical work is already a double negative on me. I also think that it’s important to look at things with a critical eye and to say, well, this is happening—why is this happening, or rather why are things not happening the way we want them to happen? I hope that people are able to ask questions when they see the photographs I make. I hope that from those questions, conversations can be had. As I am saying this, it assumes that Hmong people are looking at the work, but the reality is that they are maybe the last group that looks at the work. I think that I still have a lot to learn, and I’m constantly wanting to improve.

LK: With all the effort you put into trying to create your own visual archive of your community, I’m wondering what your motivation for doing so is, and above all, what it means to have that community.

PHH: This may seem really narcissistic and maybe even overreaching, but I really think the work I’m making will hopefully make an impact on future Hmong generations. I’m also in this weird position in my community where I feel I don’t really belong anywhere. One foot in, one foot out. And this feeling comes from having a career that isn’t readily understandable.

How about you?

LK: I think for me, above all, finding and having a community is about the possibility to find comfort where there seemingly isn’t one readily available for you.

PHH: I am curious about how you came to your photography work.

LK: I came to photography very late. I was doing painting and printmaking for a while—which I am still sort of doing—but photographing just came to me out of access. I had cameras and lighting equipment available to me at school and wanted to make use of them somehow. I started with self portraits because I was the most available around. It was very much provisional. At the same time, I was looking at artists who were using photography as their main medium as opposed to intermedia.  I was looking at LaToya Ruby Frazier and Dawoud Bey. I’m interested in how they engaged with photography in their work, especially LaToya Ruby Frazier. I was really drawn to her self-portraiture works and how it moves between candid and staged. I slowly started to include friends and friends of friends in the photographs as a way of extending the “self” in self-portraiture. It has now become an excuse for hanging out and forming my own family in Winnipeg.

PHH: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Dawoud Bey are both artists who use black-and-white photography. What’s your relationship to black-and-white, and how do you use it?

LK: I started to think about the history of social documentary photography. The beginnings of camera photography became a way to tell and advertise stories of people and places, often by photojournalists and anthropologists. Because cameras weren’t accessible like they are now, those who could afford them were mainly media organizations like newspapers and magazines who enter a community and cover stories based on their limited-time access. And so, that space has been historically filled with outsiders presenting stories of communities they are not a part of. When I use black-and-white, it is a way of entering that space and building my own images from within.

PHH: I really like that. I appreciate that way of thinking about the usage of black-and-white photography. There’s something beautiful and poignant about that.

LK: You move between genres, but when it comes to black-and-white, what’s your thinking process?

PHH:  I use it as a way to speak about the past or as a way to romanticize it. If an image is in black-and-white, that might not be obvious, but for me the reference is to the nostalgic past that maybe is only privy to people who know the specific time and space—so there’s this sort of knowledge that is required in the work. I really like the idea that not everybody gets to acquire that knowledge.

I don’t know if you have this problem but all I do is make work for my own community—the Hmong community. But very few among the community understand the work because it is so heavily reliant on art language and art theory. It becomes so far removed from the community that nobody is able to access the work and understand it. And sometimes it seems like the only group of people that understands the work is the white community. That’s always my problem. I am constantly trying to rethink and rework.

Do you feel like you have that same problem? Do you feel that people in your community are able to read your work? How do they read your work? Do you make work for your community

LK: That was actually one of the questions I had for you. A lot of your work is very much a presentation of your community. But they likely won’t be seeing that presentation. I wonder if that does anything to the work itself. But for me, whoever I’m shooting knows about the project so there’s this shared mission to see this image come to life, if that makes sense. I’m never shooting a stranger or someone who doesn’t know me and someone who hasn’t seen my photographs; so in a sense, as much as I am doing it in part for exhibition purposes, I am more doing it for other people who look like me. And I also like having the images just being non-art images that exist in the world. I don’t mind that anyone can pick it up and just look at it and take something from it even if it’s only visual. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for a trained eye.

PHH: Have you shown the work in Europe and other countries besides North America?

LK: Just Canada and the U.S. But I do often think about how it would be received. But I feel like the African Diaspora is pretty spread out, and I think the way my body is imagined in people’s heads, especially in people who are not black, is fairly equal. There’s an international flat imagination of the black body.

PHH: I think that I try to make as many entry points as possible. Whether the entry points are in the didactics or in images, I think about accessibility a lot in everything I do. The Hmong diaspora is very small and insular. When you say that, Hmong people usually have absolutely no idea. Then I have to become the teacher.  A question I get a lot is: “why photograph yourself or why photograph people like you? Why not photograph outside of the community?” I wonder if you get that too, and I wonder what your response is, and how you deal with questions like that.

LK: I think that if I was a white photographer imaging only white people, no one would ask that question. That question hasn’t been asked for centuries of whites. But I think people seeing that difference—with a lot of black bodies in that space—automatically creates this presence they are not used to. It becomes this weird, almost disorienting event. I don’t know why I am being singled out. There are white people doing photography about only white bodies, and no one questions why.

On another hand, shooting from an outsider spectator view always gets into voyeuristic territory. I have a very small niche of people that I shoot; I always have to know the person before I shoot them, or they have to be a friend of a friend, or the girlfriend of my friend or in some kind of close proximity to me. Imagining people outside of that community is tricky, because photography’s surface is such a convincing one in relation to felt reality that the minute you put an image out there, you are almost representing someone. It’s like you’re speaking on behalf of someone and I don’t want to be speaking on behalf of someone. I can only speak for myself.

PHH: Do you feel like you always need to put out a disclaimer? When I am giving a talk or when I am answering questions, I always have to emphasize that I am not a representative of the community, and that these opinions are mine only and that they are not of my community.  I am always curious how people associate the photographer with the body of work, and the community [they are from]; there always seems to be this connection, but it’s only with artists of colour that the connection is imposed on artists of colour, who make work of their respective communities, and are therefore always having to deal with putting out these public service announcements saying that they don’t speak for the community.  That’s a constant thing for me.

LK: I think that’s always going to be the case, because it hasn’t been the common thing historically. And so, we are automatically positioned to speak of that difference, but I also don’t think that it is our responsibility to be doing that, and the audience also has a responsibility to figure out those answers for themselves.

PHH: Absolutely.

LK: Apart from just imaging the figure, you also point the camera at seemingly inconsequential objects: scenes like a curtain, or an assortment of objects on the table like fruits, or a capture of a room. How do you think these little disparate objects add up to a narration of the community and the culture that is embedded in them?

PHH: I think about the still lives as punctuations. They are sometimes wrapped into the work whether it is incorporated in portraits or whether it is digitally imputed in the work. In “My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger” there are still lives that serve as punctuations—either as the exclamation mark or the period or the comment or the question mark.

LK: You sometimes have very elaborate and theatrical-looking backdrops, and there’s always this comparison between painting and photography. But your images certainly have this illustrative and vibrant formality to it. Do you ever think about your work through other mediums as well?

PHH: When I was younger I wanted to be a writer, but I’m a horrible writer. I couldn’t write. For me, the next thing was photography. Photography was the closest thing to writing, and I do believe that photography is very similar to writing. I think of them in terms of words or lines to a poem, then I sequence them, and I am thinking about what they say or the kind of poetry that emerges. I think it comes from this need to want to tell stories even though I don’t think that the images I make do a really good job of telling stories.

LK: So does fiction or illusion seem to be a useful tool for presenting these images of bodies of the community members? You’ve printed on lenticular surfaces which causes a kind of trickery for the eye in how the image is viewed.

PHH: There’s this desire and dream to go back to Laos for many members in my community, especially elders. The fantasy is that Laos will eventually become our country. At some point, we’re all going back, put away all the luxury of the first world, and live a more simple life. That is the fantasy of an older generation, and so I think about illusion in that sense. The illusion is that we will go back. Like the government of Laos is somehow going to give us a piece of land and say “Hmong people: here is your land — have it and do whatever you will with it.” Like create a new country—a Hmong country—and that’s the illusion. But it is a fantasy that keeps older Hmong people like my parents going.

LK: It’s like a coping mechanism.

PHH: Yes, absolutely.

This article is published in issue 36.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue