Location: San Jose, CA
Medium: Photography, daguerreotype, chlorophyll printing
Website: binhdanh.com
Binh Danh was born in 1977 in Vietnam. In the wake of the Communist takeover, his family fled to a Malaysian refugee camp on the island of Pulau Bidong, where they stayed for nine months before immigrating to the United States in 1979. He grew up in California and received a BFA from San Jose State University and an MFA from Stanford University. He lives and works in San Jose, California, where he is a Professor of Photography at San Jose State University. He is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco and Lisa Sette Gallery in Phoenix.
His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, the George Eastman Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among many others. His awards include the 2024 William Collins Smith Auburn Award for Advancing American Art from the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, and the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. He has been an artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, and has received grants from the California Arts Council, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and San Jose State University.
Danh works in photography and its alternative and historical processes, with a practice rooted in the intersection of memory, war, immigration, and the American landscape. His earliest and most distinctive invention is the chlorophyll print: a process by which photographic images — drawn primarily from archival images of the Vietnam War — are embedded into living leaves through the action of photosynthesis, making the images literally grow from the plant. The resulting works are temporally unstable, fragile, and beautiful, asserting the inseparability of history and the living world. From this foundation, he moved into the daguerreotype — the earliest commercially viable photographic process, invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839 — and taught himself to produce large-format, in-camera daguerreotypes using silver-coated copper plates in a converted mobile darkroom he calls Louis, after the inventor. He has used this process to photograph the battlefields of the Vietnam and Civil wars, the American National Parks, and most recently California’s historic landscapes, making one-of-a-kind, irreproducible images that inherit the gravitas and beauty of the oldest photographs in American history.
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