A personal photograph is as opaque as it is revealing. Suppose you find an old image at an antique market or abandoned with books and coffee mugs in a box on the street: you sympathize with the subjects but have no way of comprehending their dreams and regrets, the bitterness or ease of their relationships, whether their smiles are true or masked. Even if it were a photo yourself, the distance between then and now could end up feeling like a millennium. The person staring back from only a few years ago is almost a stranger.
The point of most of these kinds of photographs is to be a nostalgia jogger. They elicit memories — real or distorted — of places as much as relations. We see how people dressed and kissed — their affectations and candid demeanors — the way they counted out money, cut a wedding cake, decorated their homes. But the puzzling distance remains.
A photographer who understands this dislocation is Tommy Kha, who’s exhibition “Other Things Uttered” will be running at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., through December 31. With “Other Things Uttered,” the newly named Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. Prize winner juggles feelings of displacement, both of location and identity, curating a collection of photographs that transfigures how we conceive of ourselves and our familial memories.
“Mine VII, Twentynine Palms, California,” 2017, archival pigment print, is an unpretentious introduction to Kha’s style and technique. Against a pale-pink wall, someone just off camera tosses a cutout of the photographer’s face. Aside from their hand in the top right, we only see the thrower’s shadow, while Kha’s passport-like portrait jumps off the cracked façade behind.