With SỐNG, writer Ocean Vuong moves his work beyond the page, letting it settle into images. The exhibition—on view from January 31 to May 10, 2026 at the Center for Photography at Woodstock—marks the first public presentation of his photographic practice, revealing a natural, intimate extension of a storytelling voice that has always been deeply visual.

For years, Vuong has used photography as a side space for reflection, often alongside the act of writing. Here, though, the image is no longer a private note: it becomes an autonomous language, able to hold time with the same delicacy as his prose. The photographs move through domestic interiors, fluorescent pink–lit nail salons, bodies worn out after endless shifts, river landscapes, and shared moments of quiet. It’s an America observed up close, returned through the textures of immigrant life and the working class—without rhetoric, without distance.

Born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988 and raised in Connecticut within a working-class Vietnamese American family, Vuong draws from a diasporic memory that runs through generations and historical wounds. In SỐNG, that inheritance condenses into a central core: a series of images of his younger brother, made in the years following their mother’s death. These photographs speak of grief and care, of everyday survival, and of a tenderness that holds even when everything seems to give way. The body becomes an archive, the home an emotional landscape, the smallest gesture an act of resistance.

The title, which in Vietnamese means “to live,” already contains this ambivalence. Read in English as song, it echoes a poetic canon stretching from William Blake to the present, suggesting an idea of intimate, fragile, necessary singing. The images don’t try to explain—they try to remain. They rest on things as they are, letting relationships, glances, and absences do the work of meaning.

Accompanying the exhibition, a limited-edition artist’s book—co-published by CPW and 1080PRESS—weaves together text and photographs into a single flow, confirming how, for Vuong, the boundary between word and image is becoming increasingly porous. SỐNG isn’t a detour from literature, but its natural continuation: a different way to tell what it means to inhabit a body, a family, a history. To live, precisely.

© Ocean Vuong