Pao Houa Her

The first major monograph by the Hmong American photographer Pao Houa Her. Her work moves between family stories that may or may not be true, portraits of her own community and herself, and landscapes in Minnesota and Northern California photographed as stand-ins for a Laos she has never seen. That substitution is the heart of it: a homeland assembled from available materials, convincing and false at once, which is a fair description of how diaspora memory tends to work. This is the only book of photographs in the catalog and the only one that approaches Hmong experience through images rather than text. It rewards slow looking and does not explain itself, which is unusual on a shelf where most books are working hard to be understood. For readers of photography, art collections, and anyone interested in how a second generation pictures a country it did not lose.