Imaging Desire and Reality

Pao Houa Her’s photographs explore and represent the Hmong American community. In conversation with Makeda Best at the Harvard Art Museums, Her will talk about the art form that has held her interest since childhood.

By Vicki Xu '23
OFA Staff Blogger
 
Pao Houa Her is a photographer whose work explores legacies of desire and identity in the Hmong American diaspora. When she was a child, her family fled Laos to St. Paul, Minnesota. She grew up listening to folktales of Hmong culture. The notions of home, space and place have deep influence on her work—one series of images draws from the lush junglescapes of archival Hmong photography, and many others are portraits of members of the Hmong community. For Her, cultures and ancestral lineages are rich, fertile grounds of inquiry, to be revered and also to be gently critiqued.

Her will be in conversation with Makeda Best, who oversees the Harvard Art Museums’ photography collections, at Harvard Art Museums Student Board Annual Public Lecture on February 25. We met over Zoom for a brief conversation about her background, influences and recent work. I was in the basement of a chemistry building; she was in her studio. She was gregarious and enthusiastic. Perhaps no surprise for an artist who thinks so much about narratives and heritage, our conversation returned again and again to the permanence of her medium: the legacy that images leave, the tradition that brought us up to this point and how bridging both might create truth and beauty.

What brought you to photography?
I would say that my introduction to photography probably came from my father. Growing up, my dad was always the memory-keeper of the family. He would buy cameras and camcorders and wouldn’t know how to use them. It would be up to me and my siblings to teach him, but [especially] me, because I was the oldest, and maybe the only person in our family who was really interested in the things he was buying. 

How did you pursue photography?
In high school, I took photography classes. In junior college, I was almost done with my A.A. degree [when] I took this photo class. My professor introduced me to Wing Young Huie, a local photographer here in the Twin Cities, who was also having a show at the Walker Art Center. This time he had completed this project, called his Frogtown project, where he went into his neighborhood, which happened to be Frogtown at that time, and was making photographs of people in their homes. In these photographs, I saw faces that looked like me. Before that I was looking at photos by Diane Arbus and Lee Freelander and all these photography canons, but they had no images that looked like me and they were making work that felt really foreign to me, too. And not only was Wing Young Huie making work of people that looked like me, he was literally making images of my family. I had family members that lived in that area—he photographed my uncle and my grandmothers. Through that I saw the power of photography. What I’ve always wanted to do was to really think about ways in which I could visually represent my community in ways that maybe weren’t represented before.

What themes do you explore in your work? Do you find they change throughout the course of creation? 
Really early on, I was interested in thinking about what it means to be Hmong when I’m at home and then to be American when I step outside into the world, what it means to make space for those two identities, and what is loss when you make space for these two identities. As I made more photographs, as I thought about these things more and matured, the ways in which I think about the work has changed. It became about ideas of desire—not sexual desires, but more like, what does it mean to want to belong? What does it mean to be desired by communities that doesn’t see your existence? What does it mean to be a Hmong woman and really desired by society? I think in some ways that thread still very much rings true in the work I make, but I think also it’s completely evolved too. Thinking about history, and our history, and how that relates to the kind of different struggles that we have today—can I talk about it visually? What does that mean to be resilient? What does that look like? 

Your work Paj qaum ntjug / Flowers of the Sky  is a series of images of the Mount Shasta area. The images have a quietness to them, but they’re also gently devastating. Can you talk a bit about your landscape photography?
Mount Shasta is a region in Northern California. In recent years, there’s been an influx of Hmong people moving into that area to grow cannabis. I always knew that that place existed, maybe in 2017, 2018. In 2019, there was an article written about the “Green Rush.” It talks about how Hmong farmers were really sort of taking over this place, but also utilizing their agricultural knowledge of growing opium. Hmong people grew opium in the 1940s all the way up to the 1960s in Laos. The cannabis is another way of opium growing. I was really fascinated by the idea how history sort of repeats itself over and over again within the Hmong diaspora.

When I went down there, I was like really taken back by this place. It’s really barren; it sits on the bed of Mount Shasta. There was an eruption a long, long time ago, but the place is also almost uninhabitable. There’s a lot of volcano rocks, junipers everywhere, but you can’t grow on the land. Nothing is really on the land. But for whatever reason Hmong people have been able to prosper in this area. They imported a bunch of stuff into the space, and they were able to make like quite a bit of money.

I started doing research and going back and making these photographs. At the same time, I was completely aware that I’m not the first person to make photographs of California, or even the West, and that there’s this large and extensive history of white American men making photographs of the West. I’m thinking of Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, Timothy O’Sullivan. They made these photographs of the West to entice settlers from the East to come westward, and to talk about the vastness and beauty of California. I really wanted to dive in and channel them. The work is these black and white light boxes that luminate and seduces you into the landscape and leave you searching. 

There’s a photograph you have on display in the Harvard Art Museums, from After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw. In this photograph, an old lady stands before a flat lay of plants, looking into the camera. 
That body of work is about this Hmong man who went into the Hmong elders’ community and swindled them out of millions of dollars because he said he was working with the Lao Government, the United Nations, the U.S. government to procure a piece of land that would eventually be a Hmong country. If you buy into this Hmong country, you could be a founding member. For a lot of these elders, the chance to be a founding member was very exciting. They bought into this. It wasn’t until after they bought into this that the federal government investigated him and tried him and found him guilty.

Hmong people have never had a country. I read that story, and I was like, “What is it about a homeland that would entice Hmong elders to give up their savings to be a part of this?” I started thinking about what this country could possibly look like. The work and the photographs reference historical images that I’ve seen of Hmong portraiture, really thinking about this homeland that doesn’t exist, that never existed. If you have a bit of knowledge about plants, you’d know that the plants in this portrait are these domesticated, fake houseplants. If you look carefully, you can see that the leaves have frays. There’s a requirement of further investigation that is needed. In some way, I’m doing what this Hmong man did to these Hmong elders. I’m trying to swindle my viewers into believing that this place is real. That’s what he was doing, too: “Yes, this country is real, and it will be real—you just have to believe in it, and you have to pay for it.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.