I met Mark at Annex Gallery, where he is working as an intern. Before I knew he made photographs, and therefore counted as an artist, I thought of him simply as someone who always needed a drink bottle within reach. One of those insulated flasks used by athletes or hydration fanatics that seemed to follow him more faithfully than his own shadow. I also knew, before seeing a single picture, that he supported Barça, a very popular club in this ecosystem and reason enough to label him an “irreconcilable enemy.” Still, perhaps because of his background and his way of being, he is not a visceral fan and does not behave like many of his peers, who are mostly Latin American.

When I finally learned he was a photographer, I became curious to see how he looked at his new world. From what angle, from what distance. Mark, originally Phan Minh Duc Nguyen, was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2001. He arrived in the United States in 2018 on a student visa. First he finished high school in Maine, then studied at the University of Cincinnati. He started taking photographs in 2016 in his school’s photography club in Vietnam. First with his phone, then with borrowed cameras, until his parents bought him a very basic Canon. Today he works with a Sony camera and has already graduated in Digital Media Collaborative, with a certificate in Film and Television Directing. This exhibition at Annex Gallery is his first show in a gallery.

His main interest is ordinary people. Not the empty street, but people in action. By action he means work, not so much dynamic leisure. He is drawn to food vendors, manual workers, delivery riders, service staff, artists. He likes to see each person absorbed in their trade, doing “their job” with a certain commitment. I would call it responsibility, but for him they are the reason the city works at all. Each person is a gear that connects with others and keeps the social mechanism running. Mark conceives that variety of trades and gestures in color. That is the first surprise. We tend to associate street photography with black and white, partly because the great references have usually dispensed with color. For Mark, however, color helps show the energy, atmosphere and pace of the city. There is nothing to argue with there.

Over time he has discovered a pattern. Almost always there are people and architecture in the same frame. He is interested in how a small, fragile, moving body cuts across buildings and structures that seem more solid and permanent. In Vietnam he allowed himself to get closer to people’s faces. In the United States, out of respect and caution, he usually works from farther away, often photographing from behind or from angles that do not intrude. In his own statement he sums it up clearly: in Vietnam the camera was a welcomed friend; in America it became a window that watches and learns in silence. These photographs, taken in Vietnam and the United States, grow out of that transition between closeness and distance.

In the real world, how likely is it that a very young immigrant will exhibit in a gallery in a city with a well-established art circuit? It depends, in part, on the path he chooses and on his attitude. Mark is young, but he understands that an artistic career is a long-distance race, built step by step. Annex Gallery has, from the beginning, followed a formative approach, supporting emerging artists and showing work from other regions that is well known in its own context but barely visible in the Midwest. For the public in Cincinnati, this exhibition is an opportunity to look differently at scenes so everyday that they become invisible: the person who cooks, who cleans, who delivers, who serves. Annex Gallery presents the work of a photographer who is still exploring and defining his own language, but who already has clear ideas. It is not a bad idea to stop by, take time with the images and recognize, in those anonymous workers, something of the city we almost never visit and something of ourselves, which we rarely visit either.

The opening of this exhibition —a one-week Pop Up Show— will be held on December 12, 2025, at 5:00 PM, and it will be on view through December 19, 2025, at Annex Gallery.