On public view for the first time ever, this stunning photograph by Ocean Vuong, 𝑴𝒐𝒎 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑵𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒚, is currently installed at Sub Rosa until September 30th, 2024.   𝑴𝒐𝒎 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑵𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒚 is one portrait from a larger body of work that will be shown at the Toledo Museum of Art in October.

Ocean has described this photo project, which was first announced in the July issue of @cultured_mag, as "15 years in the making." The series includes photographs of Ocean's mother and her coworkers during their shift at his mother's nail salon in 2009. Ocean wrote: "I intended this session to be the first of many, hoping to document them through the seasons. But three months later, with the recession in full swing, my mother declared bankruptcy and sold her salon. The place that sustained us for over two decades, from which my brother and I were raised, where we worked answering the phones, evaporated overnight. The photos I took that one fateful day would be the only ones I have of that place.

15 years later, perhaps as a cumbersome way of grieving, I spent a week in July photographing my brother, who moved in with me after our mother died. What began as a study of a place, the small but mighty people who live, labor, and lose there, became an exercise in looking at the only thing left of that place: my little brother, Nicky. I suppose some projects change the way some desires change through the years, not by deliberate searching, but by discovering a more-ness, a dynamism, in what remains. In this case, the person bound to us by blood."