“Unlike writing, which is a vocation mired with maybes, the camera, for all of its complex mechanisms, can only say yes,” Ocean Vuong wrote. “Photography is, for me, a medium of unanimous affirmation.” The embrace of such affirmation is made manifest at CPW in Kingston, New York at the author’s first exhibition highlighting his visual practice: Ocean Vuong: Sống (until May 10, 2026). He joins a rarefied legacy of writers-turned-photographers, like the French queer icon Hervé Guibert or the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole. Displaying some 40 photographs, primarily inkjet prints, these images span moments from 2009, when Vuong first borrowed a friend’s Nikon, to pictures snapped as recently as 2025. CPW produced the exhibition in-house; it grew from a June 2025 New York Times Opinion piece, “ My Brother’s Keeper ,” which introduced Vuong’s photographs to the public for the first time.…