On Photobook Making & the Pacific Northwest with Brian Van Lau

Produced by Worlds Through Minds founder, Macy Castañeda Lee.

Name, age, where are you from, what format you like using, what are you currently working on if you are?

My name is Brian Van Lau, I’m from Honolulu, HI and moved to Seattle, WA 14 years ago, and am now currently living in Los Angeles, CA. I’m working with a GFX50r and previously was using a Mamiya 7, can’t seem to grow out of the rangefinder it seems. I’m currently working on two book projects, one about my father’s history as a criminal told through an allegorical narrative, and another predestine and faith in the context of kinship in the Pacific Northwest backdrop. I’ve been making work about dreams and dramaturgy on the GSW690iii before it broke two months ago, but right now that work is just pinned to my bedroom wall.

What about your surroundings/environments and upbringing interested you?

I lived in Seattle for roughly 14 years, and it’s an incredibly beautiful, mystical, and emotional geography. Seattle is not my birthplace, but rather where I became an adult, and paired with its incredibly isolating and socially debilitating culture, I think that region symbolized some sort of independent, self-actualizing, period of my life.

When was the first time you met photography? How did you feel when you met it?

My Mom owned a Canon Powershot when we first moved to Seattle, and I’d borrow hers when we’d go on roadtrips. I think I felt like a pioneer, and then did so out of efficiency, and once I was more exposed to Flickr and Tumblr, it became more of a social and lifestyle language. Photography didn’t hold power as a documentation tool until much later, and wasn’t a medium I was concerned with until after I dropped my dreams of being a mangaka after high school.

Tell us about current projects you have been working on (could be any, or just work you have been doing in general). Is this story inspired out of personal reasons, or others? What are you most excited about in these projects?

I’m working on two book projects, one (soon to be released), is called We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys, which is a collaboration, investigation, and allegorical narrative about my relationship with my father, the irony and identity crisis of Vietnamese diaspora, and the response I have as his son piecing it together. The project started as a proposition from my father amidst his brain cancer treatments, and slowly over 5 years, became a methodology for allowing more of my family to share and collaborate on their own, and their relationships with him. I’m particularly drawn to what the shift in narrative agency looks like, and what it means in the context of subverting archetypes; is it a religious allegory, a Prodigal’s Son, a resurrection? I’m interested in paradoxes, conflicting feelings and evidence that’s formed from fiction. What is photographic evidence if not the interpretation of psychological and generational relationships, what are photographs and the act of doing so if not collaborative currency?

Another book project, called Blue is What Remains (for now), pertains to pre-destiny and faith in the context of kinship against the Pacific Northwest backdrop. This is a project spun out of an ended relationship, and feels like the most visually explorative, intuitive, and romantic work I’ve made so far. Washington state is a region comprised of exquisite heartbreak to me, and this work feels like a perpetual farewell in progress.

How did you find your visual literacy? Why are you attracted to certain images more than others?

I found it via Tumblr and Flickr, then online platforms like Ain’t Bad, Booooooom, Fotoroom, although I’d been a manga and anime fan since elementary school, and a film nerd since high school. I’d even say TikTok at this point too.

I’m attracted to images that come across as a marriage between the essence of the subject, and the author’s reverence and subjectivity of them. Whether this typically means its a beautiful candid, or an elaborate staging of a scene, I look for images that hold some degree of lyricism to them, and less so for ones that betray the subject for appeal of cultural vernacular. Too often a picture is upsetting for me to look at when I can feel some sort of subjugation or reductiveness from the photographer’s sensibilities.

Imagine meeting someone who is picking up a camera for the first time. What do you tell them?

“The Blade is Me.”