Tran Minh Chau

“The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist.”

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Andre Bazin, "What is Cinema?"

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Born in 1995 in Hanoi, Vietnam, as a self-taught art practitioner, Tran Minh Chau practices photography as a method of studying the concept of “realism.” The camera acts both as the recorder of the “real” world and the mirror reflecting the photographer’s perception; thereby, a photograph is an offspring of both, a display of manipulated reality. Taking full advantage of that approach, Tran Minh Chau offers her own sense of “realism,” which happens to reflect more of the truth to her mind than what the outer world offers. In order to gain more transparency, Chau stripped her creative process of complicated equipment to maximize the time for observation and imagination, and now she creates by simply using her smartphone—the bridge of inner and outer worlds is now as thin as ever.