Photography by Kane Lê Hồng

Interviewed and Edited by Daniel Perez and Olivia Mondragón

Olivia: And… lo and behold… the artwork! 

Kane: Cool.  

Daniel: Yay! 

Olivia: So, Kane, would you like to talk about why you chose photography specifically?

Kane: Yeah! So visual mediums, photography, videography, and film have been a very important part of my life. When I was younger, as a kid, my dad would often be the designated person to be taking photos, not only in my immediate family – my mom, my brother, and I – but also in the extended family. He would always be the one holding his camera, going to big family events, and taking pictures. So, in high school, he gave me his old camera for me to use. It was this old Nikon D-something. And so, I would use it to take photos with my friends, family, things like that, and over time I gained a very acute interest for all these types of mediums, and I bought my own camera, and then coming to college, I went and pursued film and worked on sets, things like that. So, my relationship with the medium has been there for a very long time. Throughout this entire span of time, I had only worked with digital media, meaning digital cameras, cameras that record information through an SD card. You can just download them, then you get those files, then you put them into an editor, and then you edit those files. Clean, easy, it’s very modern, right? You know, everyone has a camera these days. In college, I was exposed to different types of media and I realized I had never really worked with authentic film before, film being like the physical film strips that people used to use back then. And, of course, film photography has had a resurgence over the past couple of years, but I personally had never gotten my hands on it. So, about last year, I had gone home for a college break, and I asked my dad, Hey, do you have, like, a film camera laying around somewhere? And he’s like Yeah, of course!, you know? Apparently, before I was born, he bought a camera. I have it right here. It’s a Nikon 65 that he bought right before I was born. I was born in 2002. He bought it right around the time when film cameras started phasing out of popular use, and digital cameras started to be more popular. I don’t know why he did that. So like, he bought this full kit and he probably shot, I wanna say ten photos on this damn thing and then he just, like, stopped taking pictures and maybe a year later digital cameras became really popular and he just went ahead and just bought a digital camera. I don’t know what’s up with that? So, anyway, he just kept this film camera around, and, granted, this is a more modern film camera, like, you know you might see a lot of film photographers use much older ones like a Minolta or something. But this is like a Nikon, it still has digital numbers on it and everything, so it can read light levels and stuff. Anyway, yeah, he just went into the basement or the attic or whatever, and he gave me this film camera to use and it came in this little bag, and in the bag was some batteries for the thing and, most importantly, three rolls of film that hadn’t been used yet. And that’s really cool because that means these rolls of film had been sitting there for over 20 years, you know? And hadn’t been used yet. And so the thing with film is that the actual film strips have a lot of chemicals in them and so over time they corrode and they have aberrations and imperfections in it as time goes on. So, I thought I’d try to use these rolls and see what they would look like now when I took pictures with them. So I kept the rolls and then I saved it for a very important time for me, for when I feel compelled to use it ‘cus, you know, real film photography is a very finite occupation. You have a limited amount of shots you can take. I think the specific roll was a Kodak something 20, I forgot how they’re demarcated, but this is a new one I bought, it has like 36 exposures, but the one on his old film was like 24-25 exposures, so I had 25 shots, pretty much. And so, I set that film camera aside and just waited until I felt compelled to use it.

Kane: I wanna say March-ish of 2023 I was going through a really rough time, my personal life was being uprooted and I was going through a lot of changes in family and stuff and school was really difficult for me and I was pretty much really just trying to get through the winter quarter and surviving. Every day seemed like a drag for me and a struggle and it was so difficult that I needed time to reevaluate myself and reevaluate some of my values and how I just go about my life in general, and so it just so happened that the quarter after, that winter quarter that I was having such a hard time, I had signed up for this program to go to Washington D.C and that opportunity gave me time to distance myself from everything that was going on in my life in California and I traveled for the first time to Washington D.C and I had never traveled on my own, let alone lived there for three months and worked there, interned there, see everything that Washington D.C has to offer and it was, frankly, really life-changing. And, one of those epiphanies I got while I was there is that I really need to reclaim and rediscover my family, my family’s past, and really reclaim it so I can hold it much closer to myself and hold it dear. If there was ever a time where family members weren’t there anymore or things are changed where we are much farther apart then at least I have that quality time I spent time with them to hold dear and so I really thought that was important for me to just go back and cherish the memories and time I had with my family in general.

Olivia: No, that’s wonderful

Daniel: You’re good!

Kane: So I came home after three months living in D.C and everything seemed really surreal just because D.C was such a noisy place, so much going on, all the time, every day. And then I was back home, my dad drove me home from the airport and things were quiet for the brief amount of time I was back home. By the way, I live in San Jose, California, up north. About two days after I had gotten back to San Jose my parents invited me to go out to go cherry-picking with, just, me and my dad, my mom, my brother, Ryan, and so I thought this was a perfect time to go back to that film camera and, you know, maybe taking some pictures, seeing what it’s all about. So, that’s exactly what happened, we drove to Brentwood, California, there was apparently some cherry-picking places there, I don’t know, my mom chose it, I wasn’t sure, I just drove. So I drove them down there and we were just walking through this big, vast garden, picking cherries, and I decided to just snap pictures of them, my brother, the cherries themselves, and that was just a very nice, and sweet, and calming day. Later, going back to Irvine, I visited a photo lab and, for the first time, had these photos scanned and, about a couple days later, they delivered these photos to me through email, just through digital. So that’s the first part of the film photos you might see, the cherry picking, and that was the first roll of film. And so, the second roll of film, I, not too long after, I had an opportunity during this last summer to go back one more time right before fall quarter started, Fall 2023, and for those two weeks I basically took more pictures of my family and friends just to see what these rolls of film would look like, especially since it’s my dad’s film roll, definitely focusing on creating these important memories for my family to look back on. To name just a variety of things that are showing up here, we went to a church but behind the church there’s like a statue of Mother Mary. Now, I’m not personally religious anymore but I still go with my family out of respect to them and spending time with them. Another one, my dad and I went camping with the Boy Scouts because I was previously a Boy Scout so I took a picture of my dad playing volleyball. My family had a barbecue, so I took a picture of my brother and my cousins playing. I also had lunch with a friend, we stopped by this lakeside, I took a picture there as well, so those are some of the couple places that you might have seen in the photos. And so I got those scanned and I got them back a couple days later. And so, yeah, those were how these photos came about, they were just, like, the two rolls of film that my dad gave me that were over 20 years old. I can talk about the photos themselves, they are very interesting. Overall, if you look at all of them in general, they have a purple-ish tint, a pink or purple-ish tint to it, and that’s because that’s the corrosion I was talking about in the very beginning. Over years and years the chemicals in the film, they created this, like, purple-greenish tint going on and I thought that was very interesting. And we can go over the specifics of them later on, but I think overall I’m just talking about things just in general. There were also a lot more photos. I said earlier that each roll had 24 exposures and there’s only 10 here and that’s another caveat of the old film rolls because some of the frames actually just don’t have anything appearing on them because they’re so old so they didn’t process properly, so there’s a lot of things I shot that just ended up not making it in the final recovery or in the final processing. So that’s unfortunate but at least the ones I got were pretty interesting. Overall, I can look at this little project as a family and friend reclaiming project and just, you know, preserving good memories in the confines of film photography and a lot of the pretty and beautiful aspects that make film photography what it is. Yeah, that’s, like, the biggest overview, but, yeah.

Olivia: That’s wonderful, that was perfectly articulated and I think that it’s extremely admirable of you to have such strong emotional connections to not only the photos themselves but to photography. Yeah, I think that’s wonderful, thank you!

Kane: Yeah, yeah, of course, thank you for asking the question. 

Olivia: Let’s see, if you want, we could go through each of the photos?

Kane: Yeah, yeah.

Daniel: Really quickly, I wanted to ask, did you know that the film had that tint already on it before you took those pictures or was it a surprise?

Kane: No, no

Daniel: Ooh, really? 

Kane: I thought they were just gonna be like regular photos. That was the whole point of using these rolls because I wanted to know does having the film rolls sit there for 20 years in a bag change anything? I think it’s just really interesting. It makes things even more surreal in some ways. Yeah, I couldn’t be happier with the results. I just recently bought a new roll and I’m curious to see what that will look like. But I think these are special because you can’t quite get something like this again. And I’ll just have a film roll and have it sit there for 20 years. 

Olivia: Like a personal time capsule.

Kane: Yeah, yeah, maybe I should just leave one there for 20 years.

Olivia: That’d be pretty cool.

Kane: Have my son take a picture! That’d be crazy.

Olivia: That’d be super cool!

Daniel: Passing down cameras from generation to generation!

Kane: Yeah!

Daniel: Are there any specific aspects of photography that you’ve been wanting to, like, try out? Along with this one of course. 

Kane: Other aspects of photography? I think for me…lately, frankly, I haven’t done much photography just due to time and stuff but I really enjoy wider shots. When I was in highschool, I really liked portraits in a sense that I enjoyed closeup faces and then having, what they call a Bokeh, which is a blurry background which amplifies the light in a way. But as I get older even, I get more interested in wider shots that show a greater view of the light that’s being captured and I find it fascinating that a camera can shoot that wide and have that memory encapsulated into it, in a way. I feel like I need to articulate that a little bit better because, I guess I hadn’t thought about that, what kind of photography I actually do because when I shoot I just shoot and I don’t think about it as much. That’s a really good question, I don’t think I answered that the best I could have, but maybe if you could just ask it again later on so my thoughts are more cohesive than that, but I think that’s the best I can give you right now.

Daniel: You got it!

Olivia: Is there anything specific that you noticed that you’re compelled to take a photo of or, like, any particular emotion that stirred up within you that makes you compelled?

Kane: Yeah, for me, I love the feeling of nostalgia and capturing important memories in my life in general, so whenever I’m going out and doing big things with friends or going on an outing, like going cherry-picking with my family, I think these are important things that I need to capture physically and hold to my heart, so it’s during these occasions where I would have a camera out to record it and take it all in. Whenever you’re going outside, there’s just always cool things to take pictures of and I like putting my friends and my family behind a nice backdrop, and you can see it in all these photos, like my family is behind a grove of cherries or my family is standing in front of the statue of Mary. I like for the people I photograph to be immersed in the world that we’re standing in, and I think those are the times I feel like it’s important to capture them. 

Daniel: I wanted to know if there was any specific picture you had in mind that maybe you’re specifically attached to, and if there was a reason for it?

Kane: Yeah, I can name a couple. So, I think the cherry ones are really nice in general, but I think there’s other specific ones that evoke very important things for me. If you’re looking at 4642, I mentioned that this picture specifically is the statue of Mother Mary, this super tall one, and it sits right behind this church that we used to frequent. 

Kane: What’s really special about this park in general for us is that when I was a kid, going to this statue was a big occasion for us. We would go to church every Sunday, but going to this specific statue to pray meant that there was something to pray for, and oftentimes the things that we would pray for are like big changes in our life or it would be like a mid-way checkpoint in the year where we would go to reflect as a family together. And, you know, me being really young back then, I was like I don’t really care, you know? I have distinct memories of my mom and my dad making us stand in a line in front of Mother Mary, like holding our hands together and making us try to recite prayers in Vietnamese ‘cause I went to a Vietnamese Catholic school on Saturdays to practice my faith and stuff. But yeah, we would pray and sit there for like ten minutes, and I would be so so anxious to just break away from the hold because in front of the statue is this nice park with grass, and the park is like a hill, so the grass peppers all across this hillside. So, immediately after praying, I would walk to the top of the hill and I would literally just roll down it. I’d just roll down. All the way down. And I’d do it every single time I went there, every single time, multiple times. My parents would yell at me and be like Kane, what are you doing? You know? But I didn’t really care. It was just really fun to me. I distinctly remember just sitting there and praying, and I just could not wait. I would say my prayers really fast because I was just thinking about this hill that I was going to roll down. And my brother would do it, too. So, me and my brother would walk to the hill and then we would roll down together. So, fast-forward to when I took this picture. I hadn’t been here for four or five years. After COVID, my parents stopped practicing. I don’t know what it was. When I went to college, I stopped practicing, too, so I lost touch with that part of my faith intentionally. I don’t think I believe in the values that the Catholic religion offers for me, and that was just a personal choice, but I simply just hadn’t returned here for a very long time. So, coming back here, I think a lot of emotions just came back: the feelings of family unity and reflection and nostalgia just all came back rushing down and I just really wanted to take a picture of this moment ‘cause it just evokes that really beautiful sense of simpler times and innocent times where things mattered a little bit less and you had the luxury to maybe frolic and enjoy the world that’s offered to us. I feel like nowadays there’s so many things going on that for we, as people trying to navigate this world, it’s difficult to appreciate it, but I think back then, things were so pure. So I knew that one of these pictures in this film roll had to be of this place. And I thank God that this picture made it into the final processing ‘cause I was worried that this would not come through. But also, just in general about the picture, with the purple tint, it makes the sun, like, purple-pinkish, and it really digs in this feeling of nostalgia and making this whole place just seem larger than life, or more beautiful. Now, when I look back at those memories of when I was a kid going here, I think I metaphorically see purple skies. And I think that’s a good thing.

The follow-up, adding onto that, 4647 is the other side of the hill. So if you see the elevation right there, you notice that that’s the hill. I just took a picture with my family there. We used to take pictures there as well when I was a kid, and if you see that tree on the top right, it’s poking out from the side right there. It’s, like, filling up the top right of the frame. That tree used to be a sprout and so it’s really crazy looking back at this photo and seeing now it’s gotten that tall. It just shows how life goes on. I’m just glad that my family’s with me and we’re okay and we’re in a good place, so, that was a really good picture to get as well.

4644 is also really nice for me. It’s a very sweet picture. My dad’s playing volleyball with some of his friends, I had tagged along to a Boy Scouts prep that he invited me to. I used to be in Boy Scouts for a very long time but once you’re 18, you know, you move on. And my dad still helps out with the Boy Scouts so I was like, you know what, I’ll just come out and support and I was just sitting on the volleyball side of the volleyball court and just taking pictures. I think this photo is really sweet for me because my dad and I, back in highschool, didn’t have the greatest relationship but once we both got older and we both understood each other a little bit more we began to repair that and now we are good. And I think going back to go camping with him that short weekend was a very sweet wrap-up, it encapsulated that feeling that my dad and I are okay and, you know, he’s doing his own thing, helping out with the BoyScouts, and I got my own life here in Irvine but we still had the opportunity to come together and enjoy each other’s presence. I think that it’s also interesting because this is happening in the backdrop of a volleyball court because back in Boy Scouts, our Boy Scouts had a very strange, very competitive volleyball scene, strangely enough. And my dad, because, you know, he needed friends outside of work, he participated a lot and throughout my years in Boy Scouts he made a lot of friends through playing volleyball with the parents, and of the kids. But he always tried to encourage me to play volleyball, but I was always bad at sports and I was never a competitive person and I was always really self-conscious about my physical abilities and stuff, so I never played and I had a disdain for it even and I tried to avoid it and hide myself if I ever was in a situation where people would encourage me to play. So I think it’s really interesting that this is occurring in the backdrop of that because, you know, here we are standing, my dad’s inside the court, I’m outside the court taking pictures and we’re, kind of, in our own element. I have my thing of taking pictures and my dad is playing the game and we both understand that we have different interests and we’re okay with that, I think that’s really important to me and that was integral to the improvement of our relationship. This is just an innocent picture of my dad but I think it says a lot about how far we’ve come so that’s what I mean.

4646 is just generally a very sweet moment as well. Not much behind it besides the fact that my family just had a barbecue, it was my extended family, and all the way in the back, right there, is my brother hoisting my cousin on his shoulders and they’re just walking down the road, right there, to play basketball at the nearby court. And, just a very sweet, innocent time, and my personal reflection for this is that I don’t really get to see my brother that often nowadays when I go to college but I feel like every time I come back to visit my brother grows a lot more and becomes a more mature, better person, in general, every single time. And I think, just the way he hoists his cousins really shows that he is growing into being a role model. Definitely, when we were younger, my brother was a very angry person, and I was too, and sometimes we would fight a lot or we would yell at our parents a lot and I, frankly, wasn’t a really good role model for him. And now that I’ve grown up being in college and stuff, I’ve matured a lot, I’ve learned so many things and I wish that when I was younger that I had been more cognizant of it and had shown my brother a little bit more, but, just, seeing him growing up independent of me and me coming and seeing how far he’s come just shows that we both have had opportunities to learn. And I think this is just a very sweet moment of us just enjoying and understanding what’s important for us, being family, and being a growing leader for our family. It’s hard to see my brother back there but he’s there. 

And then 4651 is one of the only friend pictures that made it, unfortunately. This is my friend, Mina. We had gone to D.C together, she goes to U.C Riverside and, I believe she graduated already but she was president of her Pokemon club or something, which was really cool, and me and my roommates and her bonded over the fact that we all loved Pokemon. But after D.C I found out she lived around the area of San Jose so when I came back to visit my family, we went out for lunch and then afterwards we stopped by a very important place to me called the Alviso Park. It’s like a marsh area and this coastside is actually a salt field with water rushing in so I believe there’s no fish or any aquatic life because it’s literally just salt mounds under there. What’s so significant about this place, when me and Mina went there to visit that day, was that every time I went there before the water was blue and the day I went it was completely pink, like pink lemonade. And it’s actually sad because in this picture the corrosion from the film over the years somehow erased the pink. I don’t know how that happened, so now the water just looks brown but I swear to you, that was one of the most surreal moments I’ve ever experienced. Like, I felt like I could just drink that water because it just looked like the pink lemonade from In-N-Out. Just in general it’s just really surreal, it’s, like, this sparkling pink liquid next to this, if you see the seafoam right there around the side, the seafoam was really sparkling because the salt was glistening in the sun. Just very mesmerizing point of view. I just told her hey, stand in front of here can’t wait to get you behind this pink body of water that’s really fucking cool. Happens, I guess, but overall it’s just a very sweet and surreal, mesmerizing moment. 

Olivia: I hope you still have the mental snapshot of it!

Kane: Yeah, no, I do, I do. I was just, I was not sad but it’s like, damn. What just happened there? 

Daniel: It’s like a slight bummer.

Kane: And like I said, I had other really good photos that I thought were really of photos but when the film roll came out, just was black and didn’t register. 

Daniel: Yeah, you said it was one of the few friend photos, as in the other photos didn’t get through or…?

Kane: Yeah, so when you turn in the film roll to the photo lab, they do the processing and everything and, for whatever reason, most likely because it’s old, the film strip I got back was completely black for the other ones and so therefore there’s nothing to be recovered or processed. Unfortunate, but at least I got this one.

I think, for the cherry ones, like I explained earlier, it’s less about the individual photos and more just the collective memory of that time. Especially since it was situated right after such big, monumental times in my life. This being a very quiet moment, one of the first quiet moments I had in a while, spending time with my family. In context, before this, I had gone to Washington D.C, worked there for 3 months, made tons of friends, did some crazy stuff, went to parties, got drunk in a city I didn’t know. Went to concerts, went to New York, I went to visit family there, so many things happened, even before that, having tons of crazy personal life changes during winter quarter. So my life was constantly being bombarded with new things, new changes over and over again and I didn’t have time to really properly process everything. So, just to have all that and then immediately zipped back into this calm and quaint environment was, in and of itself, just so surreal and, in the context of the film camera my dad gave me, I felt the need to take a picture of this very special moment because it marks time in which I can finally sit down and rest and process everything. I think for the cherry photos, that was what was most important about them.

Olivia: I love that, that’s wonderfully put. Thank you again for sharing all this. I know that this is an intimate part of the self to share and I am grateful to be able to look at these photos but also to have the you that comes through with them. I think that’s the most important part of the artwork and I am grateful for the vulnerability that you are sharing in all of this. 

Kane: Yeah, I find it strangely therapeutic to be talking about this, articulated out properly, because all these things stay in my head, these memories and these feelings attached to these memories stay in my head but I think it’s important that they’re shared. And I think that’s what’s so cool about photos, because they’re meant to be shared. It is important for me to share my memories because it helps me process and take it in, and it helps me express the passions I have in my life. Sometimes I find myself struggling to convey a lot of my appreciation, I have my family, my mom, my dad. It’s not like I’m going home every time and saying Mom, I love you  I don’t really say that often just because the nature of child-parent dynamics are sometimes a little bit strange like that, but I feel like art and photography puts into the real world what I can’t explicitly say sometimes, and so underlying a lot of these photos is the words, I love you, is the words I appreciate you, is the words I care about you, and I think that’s why I share.

Olivia: I can’t cry on video.

Daniel: That’s beautiful, man.

Olivia: I love that, that’s wonderfully special. I think that allowing photos to be shared with the world, allowing any art to be shared with the world helps preserve how monumental the moment can be for you. And I feel that you do that here. 

Daniel: It really lets us get a very, very in-depth look at Kane

Kane: Yeah, I did actually just wanted to speak about film photography in general given that I had only worked with digital stuff for so long. It was definitely very strange to have this feeling that you only have so many shots and you have a limited amount of moments that you can record, so that makes you more particular about what you want to be preserved and I think that idea behind film photography is something very valuable in the modern world even though film photography has faded out of everyday use. And strangely enough, I feel like, more than ever, we do need things that ask us and demand us to slow down and think. And, I think film photography for me was that and I definitely want to keep doing it in the future. I bought three new film rolls that, frankly, I haven’t gotten a chance to work on yet but I think its a very valuable experience to have and I think everyone should try it. Granted, it’s a little bit of an expensive medium because you have to keep buying film, but yeah.

Olivia: There’s a purpose to that, it demands you to slow down that way. That’s wonderful, I think just looking at these, you can tell that you have a wonderful eye for the kinds of moments to capture and I’m grateful that you get to keep pursuing that, I think that’s wonderful. I fully support you, that’s amazing, that’s nothing to be treated with anything less than marvel.

Kane: Thank you. I don’t think I have anything else to say. Just, thanks for taking the time out to ask these questions because I feel like I don’t get the chance to talk out and parse through my feelings to this degree so you guys are the first to hear it.