Tracy Dong
Tracy Dong is a Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based photographer and visual artist whose work aims to represent the under-represented, describe the relationship between individuals and their surroundings, and reveal the extraordinary opera underlying seemingly ordinary life. In a complex and chaotic world, she finds her pictures in moments of simple emotional and intimate connection with her subjects.
Exploring Tracy Dong’s photography I find a gentle lyricism that I respond to - many moments she holds for us in her pictures are quiet, intimate, and tender. The world she is describing is closely observed but seemingly rarely disturbed by her picture-making, even when her subject, like Edward in the photo Edward Zhu for Future Blues Vintage gazes directly at her camera, and the image is staged. It all just seems like the world just as it was when she found it. Her focus is not only on quiet moments of connection - I also appreciate when she engages with the festive and wild life of the world - like her short super 8 film at the end of this feature that captures the fun and joy of NYC’s Pride celebration. Like her photos, her film puts me right at the emotional center of the moment(s).
Revival of NYC, Pride Weekend, New York City, 2021 © Tracy Dong
I asked Tracy to tell us a little about her journey in photography:
I am the daughter of a war veteran, so a lot of my father’s photos were erased to protect my family’s identity and refugee status. Most of my childhood was spent re-creating the family archival, and I was always around something with lenses, picking up on the skill as I dabbled in and out of the arena of photography throughout my life. I shot video shorts of myself at my childhood home when I was 7 or 8, created photo albums when I traveled for tennis as a teenager, tried out modeling when I was in college but was told to slim down if I wanted to continue. That experience inherently gave me the impulse that I was going to create my own photographs and I didn’t need anyone to tell me who to put in them or how to create them. I started buying film cameras and taking photos with friends for fun, but gave up before grad school was over as I saw no return on investment on film at the time and felt defeated by the emergence of “iPhone photography”. Like many recently self-proclaimed photographers, the pandemic was what made me pick it up again. It was and still is a period of me trying to process the imminent shifts going on around me, and what it was doing to my mental health. Instinctively I bought an army of cameras. It became a way to channel the emotions. I guess like what the 1968 gunshot to Warhol did for the Warhol Diaries, I just began shooting incessantly to document everything and understand what I was going through.
The act of photographing is almost like my own act of self-reconciliation. Growing up in an immigrant family, I was taught to not trust anyone and keep to myself. I think throughout my life, I missed out on understanding the importance of nurturing connection, tenderness, and human fragility. Now, these are some of the themes present in my photographs because I am, in a way, catching up with myself. Capturing the delicate aura of another person’s constructed life in front of me, or upholding communities who normally feel invisible feel beautifully visible. This has become my way to access my heart and allow myself to connect with others. Once the technicality is out of the way, to me the art comes into play when you let your higher consciousness draw you towards the subject you want to photograph and tell you what it means to you when get the photo back. It’s a completely meditative and spiritual experience to delve into and share that level of intimacy, to see another, or others, as they are fully. We forget the sacredness in being able to see, listen, and share – our hearts, our stories. Shooting on film just so happens to heighten this meditative experience with how slow and meticulous each step is, and to achieve the tenderness theme I am after. I don’t think there’s anything more satisfying than nailing the rich and decadent texture, color, and light that films brings to a photograph, while it tells a compelling story.
I get inspiration from anything – the way 6PM evening light cloaks my bedroom, heartbreak, watching my friends fall in love, a lesson I learned in therapy, an Ingmar Bergman film, a Townes Van Zandt melody. They all ignite a feeling I want to bottle and immortalize into a photograph. I seek to create an unflinching portrait the way Joan Didion executes a sentence, and chase beauty in unlikely places through street photography the way Anthony Bourdain seeks the perfect meal in third-world countries. When I’m not shooting or working my day job, I’m gathering inspiration and mentally framing potential photos, so in a way I’m never not working. I guess that is the inquisitive freedom and curse of being a photographer.
I recently started to incorporate writing into my photography, which can be risky but can add so much depth to its meaning. A photo can have endless interpretations, but the addition of writing can corner the photo into a box. Not only am I presenting a visual, but I am verbally coercing the viewer how to interpret it. There are certain projects where that makes sense, such as the photo essay I did on my father that had a deep back-story to it that only text can serve the viewer to understand. The other in which I am currently working on documents street life in recent countries I’ve traveled to. This series will be presented in photographs alone, as it is about the visceral elements of these places and feeling the rhythm and flow of daily life through its images.
Follow Tracy Dong on Instagram: @tracytdong Film Instagram: @feelingson35mm and see more of her work on her website, tracytdong.com
Photo at top of post: Self Portrait, 2020. © Tracy Dong
↓ ↓ ↓ All Photos and video in this post © Tracy Dong↓ ↓ ↓
Father Playing the Piano at Home, Vancouver, Canada, 2021 © Tracy Dong
Edward Zhu for Future Blues Vintage, San Francisco, California, 2021 © Tracy Dong
Sunset over Niagara Falls, Buffalo, New York, 2021 © Tracy Dong
Ferry to Rockaway Beach, New York, 2021 © Tracy Dong
A short film celebrating Pride 2021 in New York City © Tracy Dong
Tracy Dong is a Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based photographer and visual artist whose work aims to represent the under-represented, describe the relationship between individuals and their surroundings, and reveal the extraordinary opera underlying seemingly ordinary life. In a complex and chaotic world, she finds her pictures in moments of simple emotional and intimate connection with her subjects.
Website: tracytdong.com Instagram: @tracytdong Film Instagram: @feelingson35mm