FotoFirst — Thy Tran Visualizes Her Struggles to Affirm Her Homosexuality















Ciao Thy, how are you?
Hi there, I am doing very well, thank you for asking.
What is photography for you?
I think photography helps me make sense of my life; it allows me to see more clearly what I am looking at. I also believe that you don’t just take the photographs – you make them. The more pictures I take, the more I come to realise that what the camera depicts can be very different from what the human eye sees, and that notion of ‘distortion’ excites me a lot. As Diane Arbus said, “a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells the less you know”. I love how photography is ‘truth’ and the ‘truth’ is up to what you want to believe in.
What is Cacher about?
Cacher is an ongoing, personal project which depicts my own struggle to proclaim my passion toward my partner: to hide my love from my loved being, to hide without lying about my own sexual identity to others, especially to my own family. The word ‘cacher’ [French for ‘to hide’] is taken from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, where he describes passion as a paradox I find myself caught up in : ‘I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, and at the same time, I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings.’ As I try to mask the excess of my sentiment, I’ve come to acknowledge the common ground between desire and denial, pleasure and pain that lies in all human relationships. Quite often, I tend to photograph the space between us, the transient moment as well as the tension between connection and disconnection, with an attempt to look for a language that speaks to that. To me, the language we use to communicate when we are in love is, perhaps, the language of solitude.
Where can you be found online?
Here’s my website, and I’m on Instagram.
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