For years, the photographer Tommy Kha hardly spoke to his mother, except for the occasional times they made portraits together at home in Memphis, Tenn. At times, the distance grew, turning mean. He was queer; she was disappointed. He left the South, first for grad school at Yale, then to New York City. But in the past decade, he returned to Memphis as often as he could to make work.
In the intervening years, those portraits he made with his mother, May Kha, as the central subject, untangled some of the knots between them. And as Kha started to make photographs around home, he revealed Memphis in a way only a second-generation Asian American could.
“Half, Full, Quarter,” his new monograph from Aperture, and “Ghost Bites,” an exhibition of his at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York, tell part of that story.
Kha, 34, grew up in the Whitehaven neighborhood of Memphis, the home of Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Outside the South, people met his origin story with disbelief. “But where are you really from?” they’d asked. “You don’t have an accent or seem Southern.” His grandparents fled China for Vietnam in the 1930s, and then his parents fled Vietnam in 1983, spending eight months at sea, before settling in Memphis, where Kha was born.
Kha was plenty Southern. His family just built ancestral altars instead of bottle trees, talked about Elvis in Cantonese and on their walls they only hung pictures of family, “We don’t hang anything that’s not a family picture,” he said.
“When I first got to Yale,” he said, “People couldn’t figure out where to place Memphis on the map.” Then, he would name maybe the most famous Southern photographer as a landmark, William Eggleston. “Then it clicked for people.”
During his undergrad years at the Memphis College of Art, Kha made friends with Eggleston by just showing up at the house. They didn’t talk about photographs. They watched movies. When Eggleston couldn’t find a copy of Alfred…
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