When Jess Tran was 20 years old, she decided to follow a boy halfway across the world from Sydney to New York. “It was pretty crazy—I’d never even left Australia before,” says Tran. Their relationship continued for almost a decade, but in the end they parted ways. “I’m really happy I made that decision,” she says, “because otherwise I wouldn’t be here, and a lot of the conditions of my life wouldn’t exist.”
Tran now lives and works in Brooklyn, with a creative practice that spans commercial photography, creative consulting, modeling, content creation and fiction writing. Photography has always been an integral part of her life, since her grandfather gifted her a Minolta X-700 at 12 years old. “Growing up in the world I grew up in, I didn’t have a lot of cultural exposure,” says Tran, a child of Vietnamese refugees. “It wasn’t like now, where you see every race, every type of person being an artist visibly online. Back then, the only Asian people I saw in creative roles were Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan—such a cliché.”
The artist started taking photos of her Asian friends at school. “It didn’t feel like art,” she says. “There was no technicality to it, no big projects… Part of that was a class thing—being from a working class family, and going to a school where becoming an artist wasn’t really an option,” she says. Throughout her twenties, Tran continued to take photos and write as a hobby.
“That was the role photography played for a long time, until I started unlearning a lot of the narratives I’d inherited.” A turning point came with the end of her long-term relationship, which spurred questions about ‘traditional’ ideas of what life was meant to look like: getting married, holding down a stable job, having a family. “The dissolution of that transitioned me into being an artist in my late twenties, really taking it seriously, and actually developing a practice,” she says.
Tran is now working on Việt Kiều—which means Vietnamese outside Vietnam—a major ongoing project documenting Vietnamese diaspora around the world. The roots of the project goes back to her own family history. “I think a lot about imperialism, war, immigration,” she says. “The trauma that happened to a lot of Vietnamese people, and happened to my parents, didn’t happen to me, but there is a knock-on effect.”
Throughout history, wars have displaced whole communities, forcing them to integrate into cultures vastly different from their own. “They carve out their own businesses, neighborhoods, cultures. And then we forget about them,” says Tran. “They assimilate, and then it happens somewhere else. The children of Palestinian refugees will probably experience the same thing in 20 or 30 years.”
That was the starting point for the project. The process began simply: by arriving in a city and posting an open-call on Instagram. From there, the connections snowballed. “Vietnamese people are very open, and very generous… Once you find one person who understands, they connect you with 15 more,” says Tran. Through the project, we meet characters like Minh, a trans man living at his mother’s home in Salt Lake City post break-up. “His house looks exactly like mine,” says the artist. “It’s cluttered, a little all over the place. You have Buddhist iconography, and then a huge karaoke set up.”
Tran’s photos are as much about this clutter as the people she photographs, like the food, crockery, and household objects that are typical of a Vietnamese home. However, this familiarity wasn’t always visible. “I was really shocked by how class identity intersected with my understanding of racial identity,” says Tran. “When I was first shooting this project, I expected everyone to have a home like mine. So when I’d enter a home and it was a huge mansion, it was shocking to me.” Still, regardless of what their home looked like, every person Tran connected with “felt like family,” she says. “And that’s not a platitude—there is something about being Vietnamese; a national identity of joy, family and community.”
So far, Tran has made around 30 portraits in Australia, the US and Vietnam, but she hopes to go all over the world. “I would like it to be a book, but I want at least 300 more portraits,” she says. “Taking photos for me is an incredibly communal experience. It’s a tool for me to understand my own culture better, and it gives me access to very intimate parts of people’s lives… I could take photos of literally millions more people.”
Editor’s Note: Jess Tran was the winner of LensCulture’s New Visions Awards 2025 in the “Humanity” category.
