© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
Tell us about the project “We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys” selected for the Urbanautica Institute Awards?
Brian Lau (BL): “Bad Guys” is a project spawn out of the archives and wake of the last two months I spent with my father in Vietnam before he passed due to brain cancer in 2020. Initially conceived as a project he requested we make together to document his journey through this illness and his eventual recovery, during quarantine of that year, I began to look at the pictures almost as an attempts of answering and piecing together the ambiguities still left in his wake, and the lack of emotional closure we had. Later on, this became more of a question and reflection on the relationship between my father and I, one of mutual interpersonal grievances, and a practically Ouroborian cycle of shame and alienation. In regards with memory, the idea was to challenge the typically saccharine and sentimental depiction of parents in hospice, and complicate that portrayal by posing the question of what was affected, what was left unresolved, and unveiling the overlap of shame and acceptance that’s carried in the images. The truth never quite leans towards a blanket acceptance of character, but nor should it lead towards condemnation; the evidence is laid out within the images, but it usually lies somewhere between catharsis and entrapment, a mirroring of the journey to unearth that evidence I had in trying to resolve these feelings about my father.
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
What are the practical difficulties you faced in its development?
BL: There were two main difficulties in making “Bad Guys”: 1. My father having passed before I could make any pictures of him outside of the two month window I had in 2019, and 2. The crux of the project being shot during 2020, at the height of the pandemic in Seattle. This meant I was unable to travel, fewer events or people had really been outside where they usually would be, and in general, pictures were harder to come by in Washington state. As a bonus, I had never received any grants or funding to complete the project, so any film, development, scanning time, prints, travel etc. the following year were completely out of pocket.
How does this work fit in your identity statement as a photographer and if relates any with your previous works?
BL: I think of myself as a photographer focused on the cross between the human condition and the greater artificiality of the world we interact with. For the last 3 projects including “Bad Guys” that I was working on, this means that my primary concern across those projects was to play with the notions of sentimentality, memory, legacy, and the perversion of them. “We Shared,” “Bad Guys,” and “Juliet’s” are intended to be read as being part of a trilogy concerning the notion of memory re-affected, the change and/or loss of home, and the pursuance of fictitious evidence in the form of re-appropriated images and found text. If “We Shared” addresses the fractured family and child-like need to crystalize an idealized version of it, “Bad Guys” is intended to challenge that constructed idealism and incorporate a greater confrontation to the shared fractured male-image shared by both may father and I, and the effects it had in relating to our respective families. “Bad Guys” is more detached and ambiguous in its presentation as both a means of reflecting the lack of closure in the wake of my father’s passing, and to better shift the gaze away from myself as a highly subjective narrator into laying evidence out for the audience to reckon with. “Juliet’s” by contrast to both, seeks to document a journey of finding a solution for both; a world both appropriately young and idealist, but one reflective and still tinged in longing that neither feels juvenile nor solipsistic. It becomes the search for the “shared gaze” in itself, rather than a construction of evidence pointing to either entrapment or catharsis; this journey isn’t entirely over, but it’s hopeful for the aimlessness in the attempt to end it.
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
What are the themes that interest you, what generally attracts your observation?
BL: Right now, I’m making a project about simulated realities and the necessity of artificial spaces/mythologies in contemporary culture, but previously I’ve been making a trilogy of projects centered around domestic life, legacy, cyclical and unresolved relationships, and memory (or the partial subjectivity of it) linking the aforementioned together. I think I’ve always been interested in story as a screenwriter in high school, and that interest is something that I’ve tried to carry over into long-form documentary, almost like the images become a storyboard for a film; each image still intends to carry visual information in the same manner. I think I gravitate towards images that lead to a search for context, or a required relationship with each other to drive the curiosity.
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
From a methodological point of view, what is your approach to the medium? How do you envision or conceptualize the projects?
BL: For the aforementioned trilogy of projects, I looked at it as a vehicle for therapy and contextualizing my feelings about where I was as a person and the identity I shared as being bi-racial, bi-cultural, and the legacy of my parents, but the inception of the project didn’t start until I was mid-completion on each “chapter” of the trilogy. There was no direct plan or intended proscriptive process for writing out each “chapter,” but a response to the changes happening as they were happening, and an editing process to happen over years and several drafts to find out what the answer for one project was, leading only to a bigger arc or question on the one needing to be asked. Primarily, I’d be shooting as much as possible and finding new ideas by looking at my archives until a story started to emerge. For “Bad Guys” in particular, the envisioning of it was partially my father’s “gift” to me as he was going through brain cancer treatment while I was living with him in Vietnam, although the intent and tone of the project greatly changed after his passing and realized a larger through line was within the archive of pictures I had been shooting for a different project, one that essentially led to writing the story and finding the edit itself.
© Brian Lau from the series "We're Just Here For the Bad Guys"
Any interesting books that you recommend and that recently inspired you and why?
BL: I’m pretty illiterate so the only three books I can really recommend that have served as the basis for my personality are “Simulacra and Simulation” by Jean Baudrillard, “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” by Erving Goffman, and “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. I think my interests have always lay within the complicated relationship between the human condition and the artificial nature of Western civilization and its mythological setting.
Who or what does influence your work in particular? Is there any contemporary artist, photographer or writer you’d like to quote or mention?
BL: My favorite 5 photographers ironically enough have not changed in the last couple years; Ian Kline, McNair Evans, Curran Hatleberg, Eli Durst, and Mimi Plumb. I have however been drawing closer inspiration from Joe Leavenworth’s “Native Son” for a different project, who seems to focus on the nuance and slow-nature of image making in story form.
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