ALUMNI IN ACTION
Photography of Belonging
By Julia Halprin Jackson
Binh Danh’s unique approach to photography transcends time and space, engaging viewers in conversations about belonging, identity and geography.
In fifth grade, when Binh Danh took his first camera to his school’s outdoor education experience — his first time camping — the middle schooler had a revelation.
“My father bought me that camera to bring on the trip,” remembers Danh, ’02 BFA Photography, associate professor of photography at San José State. “It was this instrument that allowed me to look through the viewfinder and point out things I wanted to remember. I could take pictures as a way to remember the experience. That’s when I fell in love with photography.”
That first trip into the wilderness awakened a few of Danh’s important artistic impulses — the camera offered him newfound autonomy, empowering him to choose where or who to capture, and the time outdoors helped him feel more at home in Northern California. Born in Vietnam in 1977, Danh and his family escaped on a boat in 1979, eventually landing in San José. His father opened a television repair shop, where Danh worked most afternoons after school, the white noise of tvs buzzing. When he wasn’t at the shop, he studied landscape photography in department store catalogs, fascinated by images of national parks.
“It only occurred to me in my adult life why I was interested in landscape photography,” he says. “Growing up as a Vietnamese American, I came across a lot of pictures of the Vietnam War. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I was fascinated by images of Vietnam, a country that existed so much in my imagination. That was what made me interested in landscape photography.
“As a child, I was trying to understand that history, and it was something that my parents didn’t talk about. So I absorbed that history through media and Hollywood films, as well as photojournalism.”
Binh Danh. Photo by Erin de Jauregui.
“Photography is about recording the past because you want someone in the future to remember it. But for me, it’s also about the present moment, especially when you see yourself reflected back in a picture. As a result of the interesting negotiation between time and space within the photographic medium, you’re also projecting into the future.”
— Binh Danh
Past, present and future
As a young artist, photography represented an important link to Dinh’s cultural identity. While still in high school, Danh enrolled in San José State courses through a program called Step to College.
“I took a photography course and fell in love with the teachers, the professors and the whole SJSU community,” he says, adding that for the first time, he understood that creating and teaching art was a viable career.
Perhaps his most celebrated body of work as an artist emerged after Danh completed his undergraduate studies at SJSU and earned an MFA from Stanford. In his highly acclaimed series of chlorophyll prints, he used photosynthesis to directly print portraits onto the surface of leaves. In addition, he discovered unique ways to present portraits from the Vietnam War by using 19th century daguerreotypes, a photographic process that involves creating images on silver plates.
“Daguerreotypes are created through a photographic process invented in 1839, so it was the first photographic process ever,” he explains. “I usually tell my students to imagine a time when there was no photography at all. Everything was paintings and sculpture and representational art.”
Found Buddha, 2008
Chlorophyll print and resin
11 x 9 inches image provided by Binh Danh
El Capitan, Yosemite, June 20, 2014
Daguerreotype
12 x 10 inches image provided by Binh Danh
Danh explains that daguerreotypes are created when a silver plate is made sensitive to light by fuming it over iodine and bromine vapor. The plate is then exposed to light in a camera and developed over warm mercury vapor to reveal the latent image. The image is composed onto a copper plate covered with a thin layer of pure silver. Since the image is not on a paper fiber support, a daguerreotype will outlast most any other contemporary photograph. He says the photographs emerge as mirror images, enabling the viewer to see themselves reflected back.
This technique is as powerful in Danh’s portraits of the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide as it is in his landscape images of Yosemite National Park. He cites Ken Burns’ 2009 documentary series, “The National Parks: America's Best Idea,” as a major influence.
“For the viewer to see themselves with these great American landscapes, it brings up questions of identity, history and even nationalism,” he says, adding that visiting and experiencing national parks as a first-generation American helps him feel rooted in a sense of home. Daguerreotypes allow him to introduce places like Yosemite to fellow immigrants who may have a hard time picturing themselves in national parks, perhaps because they didn’t yet feel like the U.S. was “home.”
A 2010 recipient of the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and a 2012 featured artist at the 18th Biennale in Sydney, Australia, Danh’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The DeYoung Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman Museum, and many others. In 2024, a collection of 20 years of his artwork was published in a monograph entitled “Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging.” This fall, he was the guest of honor at the San José Institute of Contemporary Art, where his work will be on display.
“Photography is about recording the past because you want someone in the future to remember it,” he says. “But for me, it’s also about the present moment, especially when you see yourself reflected back in a picture. As a result of the interesting negotiation between time and space within the photographic medium, you’re also projecting into the future.”
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Top image: Lower Yosemite Falls, Yosemite, CA June 20, 2014
Daguerreotype
12 x 10 inches courtesy of Binh Danh
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