Featured artist · Academy student
Thuan Anh Nguyen
Maryland, United States
A photographer who works the way a painter works, in veils. Light arrives as revelation and as concealment at the same time, and what she leaves out of a picture matters as much as what she keeps in.
Chosen this month by our curator from work posted in the Inspire Community. Anh came through the Academy, from Getting Started in Art Photography through to the advanced programme.
For me, light serves as both revelation and concealment, illuminating hidden truths while simultaneously shrouding others in mystery.
Thuan Anh Nguyen
Anh’s latest work
A Veil of Colour
The silence behind a veil of colour. After years of working almost entirely in shadow and silver, Anh has let the colour in, and it has not cost her a single degree of restraint.
These five pieces are part of a series Anh is working on at the moment, and it is still growing. You can follow the journey as it happens inside the Inspire Community.
From our curator
Why we chose this work
What stopped me on this series was how the colour arrived. It has been brought in by hand, gently, the way a watercolourist would bring it in, and at no point does it sit on top of the photograph like something added afterwards. It has been absorbed. The picture underneath is still doing all the work, and Anh’s photography still shines straight through it.
Then there is the palette, which is the part I keep going back to. Gold and rust in one piece, lilac and cornflower in the next, cobalt and coral, then deep red silk against black. Four entirely separate temperatures, and if you laid them side by side with no name attached you would still know they came from one hand. That is unusual, and it is very difficult to do on purpose.
Most of all, the restraint has survived. Colour normally costs an artist their quietness, and it has not cost Anh hers. The work stays honest, simple and quiet, which is precisely what it was before the colour arrived. That is why it is here.
The curator, Art Photography Academy
IGNITE Exhibition ’25 · Osner Gallery, Hout Bay
Where the veil began
Four monochromes, hung in Cape Town. Smoke, botanical overlay, a single lit eye, a turned shoulder. Seeing these first makes the colour work read as a continuation rather than a change of mind.
All four are archival pigment prints, 60 by 60 centimetres. The Osner Gallery in Hout Bay represents Anh’s work, and prints are available.
Enquire at the Osner Gallery
Self portraitThe artist
Light as the narrator
Anh is a photographer based in Maryland, in the United States, and her work is fundamentally driven by what light can be persuaded to do. In her hands it is never simply illumination. It reveals and it hides in the same frame, and it decides what the viewer is allowed to understand.
The influence she names is the Dutch masters, Vermeer and Rembrandt, and it shows in the way a single source of light is asked to carry an entire picture. Light is not the thing that lets you see the subject. It is the subject, and it is the medium, and it is the voice telling you the story.
What comes out of that is quiet. Intimate scenes suspended in time, ordinary moments turned into something closer to a meditation, and a body of work that trusts the viewer to lean in rather than shouting to be noticed.
How she got here
Anh came through the Academy
Every technique in both bodies of work was learned on Martin Osner’s programmes, in order, over time. She did not arrive able to do this.
- One
Getting Started in Art Photography
Where it began, and where anybody reading this would begin too. The eight week course that turns a technically correct photograph into a picture that moves somebody.
Start where Anh started - Two
Going Further in Art Photography
The second course, where the hand comes properly into it and the materials start doing as much work as the camera.
See the course - Three
Fine Art Photography, Next Level
Where a technique becomes a voice, and a set of pictures becomes a body of work.
Coming to the Academy - Four
The Advanced Course in Art Photography
The programme that now replaces the Fine Art Photography Masterclass, which is the one Anh completed.
Coming to the Academy
Where Anh started
Getting Started in Art Photography
Eight weeks, at your own pace, with the library yours to keep. It is the course every artist featured on this site took first, and it is the honest answer to how any of this is done.
Start where Anh startedOr watch the free masterclass first, if you would rather see how it works before deciding.