Spending one's life trying to find one's way home

Một Cõi Đi Về.

Taken from a Vietnamese song, it translates into "spending one's life trying to find one's way home".  This past Wednesday I [finally] went and saw Dinh Q. Lê's exhibit at SF Camerawork.  The exhibit showcased Lê's large 12'x14' piece of stitched together found vernacular photographs.  Lê describes how his family had to flee from his homeland to America with little time and of great importance.  Like many other Vietnamese Refugees, they had to leave most of their physical possessions behind, including sentimental photographs.  Lê eventually journeyed back to Vietnam in hopes of finding those family momentos, shifting through boxes of old found photographs in secondhand stores before realizing that in some ways, these found photographs were photographs of his family -a people torn by war and away from their homeland.  

And so he takes the photographs, adopts them for his own kin, and creates a newly formed sense of memory, of home. 

(You can still catch the tail end of the exhibit.  It's up until June 22!)