Brinh Danh is an American Vietnamese-born photographer and artist. Growing up in California, Binh Danh was fascinated by the weird discolorations left on the lawn by the sun. Shaped like a garden hose or a rake, the images were baked into the grass, the sun bleaching the bent blades. He then began to experiment with combining photography with photosynthesis, and came up with what he calls “chlorophyll prints” — photographs printed onto leaves using the sun. At the time, Mr. Danh could only marvel at the effects of photosynthesis — the process that sustains all plants — but by college he’d discovered that the sun’s power could also be used to replicate other images. And like the rake, Mr. Danh could leave his mark on nature.
From start to finish, his technique is this: Binh Danh begins by picking a leaf — often from his mother’s garden. To keep it from drying out, he fills a small bag with water and ties it to its stem. He places the leaf on a felt-covered board, and puts a negative directly on the leaf. What is interesting is that he has an archive of…show more content… Danh invented the chlorophyll printing process, baking his images onto natural canvases with wild grasses and leaves. Mr. Danh is the child of war refugees displaced from Vietnam to San Jose in 1980. For more than a decade, Mr. Danh, now 34, has tried to recapture the experience of the Vietnam War by printing images of suffering civilians, soldiers on patrol and the dead. Danh's art focuses predominately on the Vietnam War era and he has been quoted as saying that a lot of his work is involved with the theme of death. Danh has also said that the photographs he uses "bring up and start to fabricate memories" of his life in Vietnam. His images were described as being able to "summon up revulsion over present violent conflicts in the world without direct topical reference" and a critic said that his images of war scenes "evoked wars past and present with an unforced economy almost unparalleled in political
