A Photographer’s Final Collaboration with His Father

“To me, photography recontextualizes and embraces death,” explains the photographer Brian Lau. In 2019, Lau’s father had an abrupt stroke, and passed away the following year due to brain cancer. Before his passing, Lau and his father began a collaborative series, We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys, a deeply personal exploration of family, grief, and Asian American identity.

Lau, who was born in Honolulu and is currently based in Seattle, is a self-taught photographer. Like many of his generation, Lau’s formative experiences with photography stemmed from online platforms such as Tumblr and Flickr that were prominent in youth culture in the early 2010s. “Most of my education with photography has been from the popularization and influence of these online platforms,” says Lau. “Many of my peers I found and formed friendships with were due to these social platforms and found communities.” In 2022, Lau founded the online platform Arcanite Pictures, dedicated to highlighting the work of emerging artists.

Lau’s relationship with his father was a tumultuous one. Lau’s father, who had been incarcerated during his youth, left his son and family behind in 2010, when he returned to Vietnam in pursuit of a new life. Yet, when faced with the news of his father’s stroke, Lau made the decision to travel to Ho Chi Minh City with no return date in sight. Lau spent several months with his father’s new family, finding himself faced with an unfamiliar set of customs and family dynamics. It was in his final month there that Lau’s father made a proposition: work together to create a series of photographs documenting what was ultimately an unsuccessful journey to recovery. 

Throughout We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys, Lau weaves together black-and-white images of his father’s life in Vietnam alongside landscapes of the Pacific Northwest made after returning home. Drawing upon the idea of the family album, Lau is less interested in the idea of direct representation, instead offering a more ambiguous, open-ended (or, unanswered) depiction, which Lau describes as “acts of evidence being unearthed.” In photographing his father in tightly framed, small interior spaces, Lau brings us into this newly intimate space between them, while simultaneously blocking our view beyond the frame—making a direct link between their changing relationship, his father’s condition, and his history with the prison system. 

Despite being shot across various locations and years, Lau’s series creates an amorphous blend of time and place. A dark cave leads to a bright opening; his father, post-surgery, attempts to play a song on a guitar; a house is sunk roof-deep into a curved landscape; a family dinner is imbued with a sense of anxiety when lit with flash. In one image taken during Lau’s first winter without his father, a flurry of snow is illuminated with flash at night in a suburban neighborhood, giving an almost ghostly, spiritual presence. “This series became more of a reflection on the relationship between my father and me, one of mutual interpersonal grievances, and a practically ouroboran cycle of shame and alienation,” explains Lau. “I began to look at the pictures as an attempt to answer the ambiguities left in his wake, and the lack of emotional closure we shared.”

Photographs exist with almost opposing realities: they stop at a moment in time, and yet live on indefinitely, constantly transforming alongside us as we grow, learn, and change. We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys narrows in on this tension, acting not only as a means to process grief—the loss of a father, the dysphoria of his Vietnamese lineage, a deteriorating sense of home—but also as a way to make sense of Lau’s relationships. “Finding the story, and unraveling what had happened and the many infinite layers in our relationship that ended so abruptly took the most time and patience,” says Lau. “It took years and I’m still finding answers.”

Brian Lau is a runner-up for the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.