“In a sense, that’s my mission: to hold onto what’s transient, even as it fades, leaving traces behind.”

At an early age, Vĩ Sơn Trinh learned of his parents’ journey as refugees escaping Communist-ruled Vietnam. They spent seven days and nights at sea, eventually arriving in Galang, Indonesia, where his mom promptly gave birth to Vĩ Sơn. While his parents’ story illuminated his own journey to find his identity as a second-generation immigrant, Vĩ Sơn realized his experience was one among many and became inspired to use visual storytelling to give voice to other similar narratives of immigrant families.

Vĩ Sơn’s different projects, such as Silk Rise, Chinatown, and The Stories We Carry, aim to preserve everyday moments that explore cultural identity among second and third-generation immigrants. His photography immediately draws you into small, nuanced moments that carry a weightless glow of compassion and gratitude. The soft, faded, dream-like tone of his images feels like long-forgotten memories that unexpectedly visit you, almost like déjà vu. His images are comforting in their reassurance, giving order to the disorder that arises from intergenerational trauma.

As a visual journalist, photographer, and full-time cardiac nurse, Vĩ Sơn Trịnh uses his photography and filmmaking to uncover stories of resilience, the perseverance of familial bonds, and identity among refugees and immigrants.

Your images communicate a quiet, emotional depth, even out of context. Are there other elements in your life that influence your work? My influences are like waves—each one carrying fragments of memory, connecting the past to the present in ways that feel both vivid and elusive. Some inspirations are simple moments, like the hum of tires on the road when I drive alone. It reminds me of family road trips, my dad guiding us to visit relatives in Los Angeles, those long hours becoming my first experience of quiet spaces, where my thoughts could wander freely. There’s a kind of longing to capture those fleeting moments, to preserve the simplicity of what once was. This is why I’m drawn to photographers like Rinko Kawauchi; her work feels like visual haikus that honor small, often overlooked details. Her images remind me to pause, to see the truth in the subtleties, to find beauty in what others might overlook.

Do other art forms inspire you as well? Music also plays a crucial role in my creative process, adapting with my environment and mood. When I’m out on the streets, blending into the rhythm of city life, I listen to Shigeto. The intensity of his beats fuels my energy, pushing me to navigate crowds, cars, and alleyways with purpose. In contrast, when I’m seeking something introspective, I turn to the calming compositions of Olafur Arnalds or Ryuichi Sakamoto. Their music has a way of evoking nostalgia, allowing me to connect with fragments of memory that need space to breathe and take form.

Grief, too, influences my work. Creating has become a way to process loss and transform pain into something tangible. It’s an attempt to find beauty in absence, to honor what’s slipping away by capturing it.

In a sense, that’s my mission: to hold onto what’s transient, even as it fades, leaving traces behind.

There is a quiet tenderness to your photos with an emphasis on small moments, often up close. When you shoot, do you have a vision of what you want already in mind or are you simply paying attention to those moments as they unfold naturally? When I first began, there was no map, no destination—just the pull to capture everything under the sun, as if each moment could somehow fill an emptiness I hadn’t yet named. I was chasing a high, really, capturing whatever caught my eye, drawn to the sheer wonder of it. The camera became a net for everything fleeting, everything that seemed to slip away as soon as I looked at it. These days, when I work on a project, I carry that same innocence, that same sense of wonder, but there’s a steadiness to it now, a direction. I still find myself searching for that pure feeling, that unfiltered connection. I might start with a goal, an idea of where I’m headed, but once I’m in it, once the subject and I begin to share a kind of quiet understanding, that’s when things start to bloom on their own. The moments become softer, truer. It’s as if the image decides to reveal itself, layered and deep, only once we’ve learned to be still enough to listen.

I recently came across a wonderful explanation of how poetry, in particular, can be this improbable portal, or backdoor, into the cosmos by sneaking ideas into our subconscious, ultimately changing the way we perceive the external world. I realized how photography, likewise, can do the same thing…a visual poem, if you will. With that said, how did The Stories We Carry project change your perspective and the way you relate to the world? That’s such a beautiful way to put it, Taran—“poetry as a portal,” a doorway into other lives and experiences, ways of seeing we might never have considered. The Stories We Carry project felt like stepping into that portal, and through it, I was able to witness the inner worlds of first- and second-generation immigrant families, each one carrying their own histories and memories, held in everyday objects and stories. While I’m part of this community through my own family’s journey, the project gave me something rare: a deeper, more intimate sense of what it means to walk in someone else’s shoes, to feel their joys, their struggles, their resilience. Photography, for me, became a way to bridge that space, to capture glimpses of lives that are both familiar and vastly different. Each person I photographed gave me a doorway into their reality—a chance to see not just the visible details but the weight of their histories, the layers of their identities. The project reshaped my own understanding of belonging and displacement; it reminded me how nuanced these experiences are, even within a community I thought I knew well. It’s one thing to know that each immigrant story is unique, but it’s another to witness it, to be invited into those spaces, and to come away changed, with a broader compassion and a new way of seeing the lives around me.

Your journey to become a nurse, and the job itself, seems to play a big part in your identity and, likewise, your approach to your projects. Would you say there are any relative parallels to your visual journalist work and your day-to-day profession? Nursing and visual journalism share a surprising intimacy—both are grounded in careful observation, empathy, and the power of listening. My work as a nurse has shaped me into a more attentive photographer, just as my background in photojournalism has helped me to see my patients in greater depth. Nursing calls for a sensitivity to detail, a watchfulness that allows me to notice the smallest changes in a patient’s health or demeanor, knowing that these subtle shifts can mean everything. It’s a skill rooted in close observation, much like photography, where one frame can hold a world of unspoken truths.

In both fields, there’s an art to asking the right questions. As a nurse, I ask patients about their symptoms, their medications, their financial and emotional well-being, their homes and support systems—each answer adding another layer to their story, much like a journalist drawing out a narrative. It’s not just about gathering information; it’s about understanding how each piece of their life impacts their health, their journey. And when I’m photographing, that same curiosity shapes how I approach people. I’m attuned to the layers beneath their expressions, their gestures, the environment they inhabit.

Perhaps the deepest similarity is the sense of compassion each role demands. Nursing has taught me to look beyond the immediate—to see my patients not as cases, but as individuals with stories, histories, and vulnerabilities. That awareness has changed how I approach photography, too, infusing my images with a tenderness and empathy that only comes from bearing witness to both the fragility and resilience of others. In both nursing and photography, I’m reminded that what I capture or care for is not just a single moment or person, but a piece of a much larger, intricate story.

Do you have any projects on the horizon or ideas ruminating? Some days, the weight of picking up the camera feels heavier than I remember, like the lens has grown distant, more elusive. The everyday currents of work, the quiet exhaustion of life—it all leaves me feeling like creating is both a refuge and a labor. But I often find myself drifting into a daydream, imagining a project I haven’t yet begun: an archive of my father’s old Hi-8 footage and old photos from his visits to Vietnam in the ’90s, woven with scenes of our family’s early days here in the States. I want to tell our story, to trace our family’s path, the way memory lingers in old tapes, how it shapes us in ways we’re still learning to name.

Recently, I’ve felt a pull from others in my generation, other creatives using art to reach into their own histories, to confront the weight of intergenerational trauma and shape it into something tangible, something that heals. There’s a kind of solace in that, a shared language. I hope to make space for this work, to find my own way of piecing together fragments of that story, connecting with others who carry a similar thread of resilience and memory. Maybe, in time, these fragments will take form—a new project, a way to honor what’s been both lost and found.

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