How a Hmong Photographer Creates a Striking Narrative about Laos

Our Hmong elders often narrate stories about Laos. In one, they carry bamboo baskets on their backs as they leisurely walk barefoot along the rugged mountainsides toward the rice paddy fields. Idiosyncratically shaped hills embellish the landscape, providing a panoramic view of steep valleys as green as dragon skin. Gibbons frolicking atop banana trees serenade passersby with their melodies, while Asian unicorns prance behind the emerald timbers. In another story, the elders transport us to wartime Laos, where mountains are set ablaze by cluster bombs. Rotting carcasses of water buffalos litter the bomb-stricken landscape. Bloodstained trails zigzag through the compressed jungles as the eyes of trees surveil lost wanderers. In this account, dead men become tigers, the most malevolent of all creatures. The tigers lurk behind bamboo huts, roaring through crevices exposed in the dead of night.

Pao Houa Her, a Hmong photographer born in Laos and raised in the United States, takes these conflicting geographies of Laos as frameworks for the series My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger (2017) to ask: How do Hmong in the United States imagine Laos when they do not have a direct connection to it? Which of these scenes—literal or allegorical—resonates with Hmong? After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Indigenous Hmong who served as American proxy soldiers in Laos were displaced into the West as political refugees. Many Hmong refugees resettled in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota, where Her’s family has lived since the mid-1980s.

Her’s photographic repertoire draws on the fragmented temporalities and uneven geographies of worlds past to perform a visual narrative of how these disconnected histories unfold in the present. She always carries a camera with her in order to stage a photograph or capture an accidental moment with family and community members, both in Laos and Minnesota. Her imbues her photographs with lust and desire—for her subjects and for the homeland—with the need to grieve for the dead, now specters in our splintered memories.

“One challenge of my photography is to create a narrative that does not require a beginning or an end,” Her told me recently. A circuitous trajectory of Her’s work formulates a complex metaphorical dialectic: the blurriness of both prewar and war-torn Laos narrated by her elders. The country’s distance—both geographically and metaphorically—seems closer than it appears. This circular vision materializes through a sequence of illusions that are simultaneously mundane, absurd, and chaotic.

Faux flora epitomizes a major hallucinogen in Her’s work. “The floral makes something hard to look at beautiful to look at,” Her says. The paradoxical pain and pleasure in looking requires a psychic reconciliation to disentangle the various oppositional elements within Her’s photographs. How do we resolve the antagonistic impressions of Laos? Her does not claim to fulfill the expectations of our imagined geographies, but rather to draw from our contradictory archives of knowledge to adjust our gaze—and mind—beyond the visual medium.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies,” under the title “My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger.”