12/02/2025
Hmong Photographic History and Culture Archive Receives Measure P Arts Grant
I am pleased to announce the EAAC grant and launch of this long awaited project in partnership with the Fresno Historical Society.
Between 2004 and 2012, I captured more than 52,000 digital photographs of the Hmong Diaspora in Central California and the homeland of northern Laos.
Subjects ranged from refugees arriving at the airport to shamanic ceremonies, weddings, funerals, farming, Hmong politicians, protest rallies, traditional village architecture, the lingering impact of American bombing in Laos and the Hmong American cultural fusion.
The resulting book, ‘Soul Calling: A Photographic Journey Through the Hmong Diaspora’ (Heyday 2012), and two museum shows used only a tiny fraction of these images- about 200. Most of the stories captured in 130 subject folders have gone untold- until now.
Over the next three years, some 1,500 to 2,000 selected images with detailed captions and search keywords will be uploaded to a groundbreaking online archive on the Fresno Historical Society’s servers. Longer narrative texts will be added to each of the original subject folders.
Until now, most collections of historic photography archived at libraries and museums have included little contextual information. It was up to researchers to triangulate other data and make educated guesses about dates, locations and the identities of people in the photographs.
That paradigm was shattered in 2007, when I was introduced to the concept of creating collections. Rather than waiting for a photographer to die and bequeath boxes of negatives, a museum or library could proactively commission living photographers to upload documentary work along with descriptive captions and first person narratives. This initial Measure P grant opens the door to making that dream a reality.
While we are building the archive as a tool for scholars and teachers, the target audience also includes future generations of Hmong families who allowed us to document their lives during a traumatic period of exodus and resettlement. Their unborn descendants will one day log on to the archive to see what their ancestors lives were like during that tumultuous time.
21 years have now passed since the fieldwork began. Our team will revisit and re-photograph selected families to capture the changes that have occurred during that interval. For example, many of the children we photographed 21 years ago have now graduated from college and will be able to catch us up on their families’ lives through the lens of an American education. In 2004, most of the new arrival refugees we met spoke no English. But today even many of the parents communicate easily.
We look forward to meeting them again and introducing them to you.
