Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging | Book Launch

Wednesday, December 7, 2022
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

Join us as we celebrate the book launch for Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging (Radius Books, 2022). The event includes an artist's talk by Binh Danh, as well as a panel discussion of the ways in which the physical form and creative content of Danh's work informed the book's design process with Radius Books Creative Director David Chickey. Joining Danh and Chickey are panelists Rachel Phillips from PhotoAlliance, Amanda Minami, co-founder of Camera Obscura (camerasobscura.io) and sponsor of the Minami Book Grant for Asian American Visual Artists at Radius Books, and moderator Anna Lee, Stanford Libraries Photography Curator. The event was co-sponsored by Stanford Libraries and ​PhotoAlliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the understanding, appreciation and creation of contemporary photography.

WATCH THE FULL RECORDING HERE:

Credit: Stanford Video

ABOUT THE BOOK

Binh Danh was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the US in 1979. Early in his career, Danh pioneered a technique of printing images directly onto plant matter, activating the plants' chlorophyll with sunlight. Using this process, Danh printed images associated with the war in Vietnam onto the leaves of tropical plants and grasses. Of this work, Danh explains, "This process deals with the idea of elemental transmigration: the decomposition and composition of matter into other forms. The images of war are part of the leaves, and live inside and outside of them." Known for his innovative approach to alternative photographic processes, Binh Danh extends and reconsiders the pursuit of pioneering nineteenth-century photographers. For almost a decade, Danh has traveled across the American West, making daguerreotypes of scenic vistas on silver plates. Danh imbues this scenery with a distinctly personal perspective, negotiating his connection as a Vietnamese American with the landscape and history of the United States. This inaugural monograph features two volumes in a slipcase, bringing together three bodies of work and a separate book of essays and memorabilia that serves to contextualize Danh's work.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Binh Danh is an Associate Professor of Art at San José State University's Photography Program. He received an MFA from Stanford and a BFA from San Jose State University and has emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war. Danh produces socially engaged work that often involved community outreach and archival research that deals with mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality. His awards include a 2010 Eureka Fellowship and a 2019 Creative Work Fund. His work has been collected by the deYoung Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among others.