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Grounded in the university’s collection strength of American modernism, the William Collins Smith Auburn Award for Advancing American Art recognizes American artists and artistic scholars on a national level whose work encapsulates the same principles displayed in the 1946 Advancing American Art exhibition: creativity, experimentation and innovation – the very cornerstones of artistic endeavor that remind us that art is not just a reflection of our inner and outer world, but a catalyst for change and growth. The inaugural recipient, associate professor Binh Danh of San José State University, embodies these guiding principles. Bringing a new perspective to traditional photographic processes, Danh’s work challenges widely held conventions about identity through nature and landscapes, inviting viewers to take another look at the known and familiar to discover the new.

Join us as we celebrate the book launch for “The Enigma of Belonging” (Radius Books, 2022). The event includes an artist’s talk by Binh Danh, as well as a panel discussion of the ways in which the physical form and creative content of Danh’s work informed the book’s design process with Radius Books Creative Director David Chickey. Joining Danh and Chickey are panelists Rachel Phillips from PhotoAlliance, Amanda Minami, co-founder of Camera Obscura (camerasobscura.io) and sponsor of the Minami Book Grant for Asian American Visual Artists at Radius Books, and moderator Anna Lee, Stanford Libraries Photography Curator.

The event was co-sponsored by Stanford Libraries and ​PhotoAlliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the understanding, appreciation and creation of contemporary photography.

Binh Danh (American, b. 1977 Vietnam) uses alternative printing techniques to explore the relationship between history, memory, and the landscape. His interest in the power of photography to define the past and construct national identity unites his studies of the Vietnam-American War, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, and Yosemite National Park. Upon visiting Vietnam as an adult, Danh recognized that remnants from the war were still visible in the country’s landscape. Seeking to convey this lasting imprint of the conflict as well as our collective memories of it, Danh began printing negatives of mass-media photographs of the war onto natural supports, such as leaves and grass, using “chlorophyll printing,” a process he invented, which transfers photographic images by means of photosynthesis. On a subsequent trip to Cambodia, Danh visited sites connected to the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime. The trip inspired a series based in part on the regime’s own interrogation photographs of prisoners. Creating both chlorophyll prints and daguerreotypes, one of the first photographic processes that yields a highly detailed, mirrorlike surface, Danh’s works are altars or memorials to the prisoners and, in his words, provide “a proper homage to the legacy of their life.” Danh turned to the daguerreotype process once more when photographing the iconic sites of Yosemite, first brought into the American imaginary by Carleton Watkins in the 1860s and popularized by Ansel Adams in the 20th century.