Solitary Moments : Tri Tran Came Here From Vietnam With a Camera--and a Passion for Pictures

As a young boy with a plastic camera in his native Vietnam, Tri Quang Tran didn’t know how to crop the photos he took of his family, but he knew the images he wanted. So he took a pair of scissors and cut the negatives the way he thought the prints should look. The lab refused to print them. It was 1974.

In 1989, Tran still sees images his own way, which has earned him his third area exhibit of black-and-white photos in two years. It started Saturday at the McGroarty Arts Center in Tujunga. And no, he doesn’t use scissors anymore.

“This is a passion,” said the self-taught photographer, whose day job is as a failure-analysis engineer for a Burbank semiconductor company. “I want to do photography 24 hours a day, the rest of my life.”

“You usually see happy scenes of children smiling and ice cream cones, and his wasn’t like that at all,” said Alice Asmar, McGroarty Arts Center curator. “There is kind of a solitary quality with the people. His work was more like the Oriental woodcuts.”

Tran, 27, whose father was a senator in South Vietnam, arrived with his family in Los Angeles two days before the fall of Saigon in April, 1975. He started taking pictures the moment he arrived, and got a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UCLA in 1983 “because it was a practical thing to do,” he said.

He has taken a single photography class, in darkroom techniques, at Santa Monica College because he is always trying to improve his skills in black-and-white printing.

“I can’t say the same thing with color,” Tran said. “In color you try to mimic reality. You take the photo and then try and reproduce it the way it was. But in black and white, there is a craft, an art in everything involved, from taking of the picture to processing and the printing, and the presentation that you can do to express your art.”

“He’s not looking for anything in particular,” said his friend and adviser, Mark Schulte, “but he’s always looking. We were driving back from one of the galleries one day and Tran asked me to go around the block again. He spotted a multicolored, beat-up Volkswagen in front of this oddly colored building.”

Shortly afterward, Tran noticed the reflection of parked cars in the mirrored walls of a building in North Hollywood and stopped to photograph that, too. “That’s beauty for him,” Schulte said.

Those two pictures are part of the 40-photograph exhibit.

Tran said he would like to return to Saigon, to photograph “the people of my neighborhood and the place I grew up in.” He worries about being at risk if he returns because his father was in politics. “The one thing I regret is not being able to bring any of the photos I left behind in Vietnam. I’m sure they’re all gone.”

He lists noted photographers Henri Cartier Bresson and the late Andre Kertesz as his favorites because “they have the ability to capture the moment,” he said.

“None of the Vietnamese I know do photography,” Tran said. He has a difficult time making his parents and grandmother understand his own appreciation. “We tend to be very practical, career-oriented people. My grandmother feels you need an office or a shop to have a career.”

He wants his photographs to have movement, atmosphere and mood, Tran said, and he always tries to capture an image as a permanent impression of people.

“Tri Tran: Photographs,” to April 28, McGroarty Arts Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, closed Sundays. (818) 352-5285.