‘This whole other reality’: Pao Houa Her’s photos show complexity of Hmong diaspora

This year marks 50 years of Hmong refugee resettlement and immigration to Minnesota. MPR News will feature Hmong Minnesotans in a variety of careers through the month of May as part of our “ChangeMakers” series. This series highlights Minnesotans from diverse and often underrepresented backgrounds who are making an impact. 

Pao Houa Her tries to capture the idea of a “homeland” using photography, be that through imagery of fields of poppies and croppings of fake flowers, Hmong elders or larger-than-life junglescapes.

Her is a Blaine-based artist and photography faculty at the University of Minnesota. She is internationally recognized for imagery of the Hmong diaspora, which is rooted in her experience of being born in Laos and fleeing, as a baby, with her family.

With her parents, Her lived in the jungle for a year before escaping to a refugee camp in Thailand, and finally relocating to Minnesota in the mid ‘80s. She grew up in St. Paul.

Her and a fellow ChangeMaker, the writer Kao Kalia Vang were among the first Hmong Americans to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.

There is currently an exhibition of Her’s work at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin called “The Imaginative Landscape.” Her lightbox photography can also be seen at HmongTown Marketplace in St. Paul.

Why did you become a photographer?

I became a photographer because I couldn’t become a writer. I became a photographer because writing was, and has continued to be, really hard for me. Photography, in a lot of ways, does the same thing writing does, but you see it with your eyes, and you can think about it.

Whereas writing, you have to learn how to read and write, and you have to learn how to structure sentences together, and you have to learn how to put words together. That was always really hard for me as somebody that spoke English as a second language. So photography became the stand-in for writing. 

My first memory of [photography] would be in sixth grade [at Frost Lake Elementary in St. Paul], when I had to learn English as a second language. I would often get separated from the rest of my class. It was the ESL teacher, Mr. Johnson — my first photography experience was when he handed me a camera and black-and-white film. I was tasked with going home and making pictures.

I remember I made a picture of my great aunt, and he helped me develop it, and he saw the potential in me and said that he was going to enter this photograph into a contest, because he thought it was worth something. That’s my earliest memory of somebody other than my father allowing me to make something.

You’ve done documentary photography, landscapes and portraits. What themes show up in your work? 

I make work about the Hmong diaspora.

I’m really interested in the questions that Hmong people have surrounding homeland. I’m interested in our Hmong collective desire and longing for things. I’m interested in our history, in the way it continues to show up again and again in the lives that we live here in the United States. 

I’m interested in the American War, (Note: Many use the term “American War” to refer to the Vietnam War and the “Secret War,” a Vietnam proxy war fought in Laos) how the war has shaped our collective memory, how the war has shaped our Hmong elders, Hmong men. I’m interested in the way in which we as children of war veterans have inherited those sets of traumas and how we deal with them.

Your studio is full of junglescapes the size of movie backdrops. What is the inspiration for this series of work?

After the world opened up again after the pandemic, my parents decided that they were going to take all my siblings and I — there’s seven of us kids and my sister’s husband and my two nephews — we all went to Laos. This was the first time I’d been to Laos with my parents, and for a lot of my siblings, it was the first time that they had been to Laos.

My dad decided that he was going to show my sisters and I these places that he and my mother and I lived with my maternal grandmother and their relatives while they were hiding in the jungles of Laos. 

I started photographing these places where my father was telling my sisters and my brothers and I where they lived. In June of 2023 I decided that I was going to go back to Laos, and I was going to finish this track that my father had sort of lined out for me. I hired a driver and made stops along this road that went from Laos into Thailand, and started photographing.

I thought about the way in which these junglescapes were sort of backdrops for these lives that continued, right? Hmong people hid in the jungles of Laos, but their lives did not stop. They continued. Hmong people got married in the jungles of Laos. Hmong people died in the jungles of Laos. Hmong people conceived babies in the jungles of Laos. Hmong people had babies in the jungles of Laos.

What are you thinking about on this 50th anniversary of resettlement in Minnesota?

I feel really grateful for my parents coming here. I think about what the American dream is, and I think I’m living out the American dream: I’m an artist. I have a practice. I’m teaching art, I’m living art, I’m breathing art. I’m able to pay for my house. I’m able to support people in my life. Hmong people have been really resilient in America, in the 50 years that we’ve been here.

[But] the narrative is that we should be really thankful for General Vang Pao, for the Americans, to be given an opportunity to live here in the United States, the greatest, most prosperous country in the entire world.

We should be grateful for the fact that in the short 50 years that we’ve been here, we’ve had Hmong leadership in every aspect of our lives. We have Hmong leaders in politics, we have Hmong leaders in corporate America, we have Hmong leaders in nonprofits. There are Hmong leaders everywhere, right? 

That narrative often leaves out what it’s like to grow up in a country whose history is rooted in racism, in slavery and that anybody who is not a white European is made to feel like we should be thankful for everything that is given to us. Sometimes our Hmong elders really feel that way.

But not thinking about the war, not thinking about what it took for us to get here, what it was like living here in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, what it's like living here now, all the racism that exists.

That is something that I think our Hmong elders and even Hmong people in our community — sometimes what we fail to realize. Our alliance with the Americans makes us an untouchable group, but there is this whole other reality. It's something I think about a lot.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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