In the lexicon of contemporary art photography, few names ring with such poetic irony as Pho To. Born in Vietnam and now a fixture of avant-garde visual culture, Pho To’s rise has been as unpredictable and evocative as his work itself. The name, inherited from a great-grandfather who never touched a camera, seems now less a coincidence than a quiet prophecy—a linguistic relic that gestated for generations before finding its ultimate referent.
Pho To did not always intend to become a photographer. In fact, his trajectory into visual media was, like so much of his practice, marked by serendipity. After relocating to the UK to study veterinary science and sculpture at the Barking School of Art, Pho soon found himself alienated by the rigidity of anatomical discipline and the self-referential aloofness of contemporary sculpture. The pivot came in the form of an incidental gift: a battered 35mm camera, passed on by a fellow art student who was divesting himself of all worldly possessions in what Pho later described as a “slow-motion Dadaist performance.” The camera, then, was both relic and catalyst—an object imbued with layers of relinquishment, risk, and renewal.
“I didn’t realise there was anything special about my name until I came to England,” Pho recalls. “Then people began to smile or make puns when I introduced myself. I suppose it’s fitting. My whole practice is about names, about misreadings, about light being both present and lost.”
Indeed, Pho’s photographic work is at once lyrical and illegible. He is a practitioner of what might be called aleatory imaging—a technique rooted in chance, miscalibration, and deliberate occlusion. Working primarily with analog equipment, Pho eschews predictability in favor of what he calls “contingent seeing.” He frequently sets his manual camera to randomized exposure, aperture, and focus values before shooting. Sometimes he leaves the lens cap on. Sometimes he takes entire rolls of film with his eyes closed. “I don’t want to be the king of the image,” he says. “I want to be the medium through which accidents speak.”
This artistic sensibility has its intellectual ancestry in the Situationists, the Japanese Provoke movement, and the writings of Vilém Flusser, who saw the photographer not as a master but as a servant of the apparatus. Like these predecessors, Pho To treats the camera not as a tool of control but as an agent of disruption. His photographs oscillate between abstraction and documentary, between presence and absence. They are grainy, overexposed, underdeveloped, sometimes barely photographs at all. And yet, in their failure to conform to expectations, they open a new aesthetic horizon—one in which the very notion of authorship is gently undone.
Pho’s most recent series, The Gesture of Forgetting, was exhibited at the Palais de Cherbourg in Paris, and subsequently acquired in part by the Truro Modern. Comprising 108 images shot over six days in Istanbul, the series resists coherent narrative or spatial mapping. The photographs are uncaptioned, untitled, and hung in no discernible order. Viewers wander the gallery as one might wander a city after dark—disoriented, alert, alive.
In interviews, Pho speaks less like a photographer and more like a philosopher. “We think we see with our eyes,” he muses, “but often we only see with our memory. Photography, when it’s most honest, breaks that circuit. It lets us see something we cannot name.”
And perhaps that is the paradoxical gift of Pho To: to make visible what is otherwise refused by clarity. In an age of visual saturation and algorithmic certainty, he offers instead opacity, mystery, and the sublime terror of randomness. His work reminds us that vision itself is fragile, fractured, and always already mediated.
We are used to photographers who seek the perfect light. Pho To seeks the shadow behind it. He may have once studied to be a vet, but it is in the wounded, wild realms of vision that he has found his true calling.
Selected Exhibitions:
• The Gesture of Forgetting, Palais de Cherbourg, Paris (2024)
• Serration: Images Against Meaning, Dungeness Gallery (2023)
• Negative Space, Modern Art Gallery, Windermere (2022)
Publications:
• Monochrome Misfires
• Pho To: A Catalogue of Errors
