The Sleeper

’The Sleeper’ presents a photographic world built on Nguyen’s experience of growing up through successive expatriation cycles. In this work, the author reflects on life’s transience at the threshold of separation, with migration on the horizon.

The Sleeper

My time in the country would be limited; that was something I always knew. 

December 2023. Immigration policies in the UK once again became more restrictive. I’ve spent more time in this country than I can remember, yet the prospect of losing the life I’ve had here in the past decade becomes an irrefutable reality.

I’ve come to know Nico in recent years, and I’ve grown fond of him. I wanted to be like him, and I wanted to be cared for by someone like him.  I didn’t realise until now that he’s become a cognate for love that eased my anxieties when it felt as if there was no future, when individual life has proven to be of little significance to politics. And when politics got in the way of my personal life, even his company felt like something that would fade. Life at the cusp of permanent separation felt hurried, every minute more intense, heavier, and sublime.

I started making Nico sit for my pictures. I wanted to see myself in his image, and so he was then the sole occupant of my image-world. I wanted to have faith in my medium that somewhere between the process of my picture, he'd understand that my experiential time is not the same as his, so there were things I couldn’t speak of but wished he’d feel. I wanted, too, to remember him, in photographs, as I had known him, should life come between us. I mourned our time in anticipation, and through the pictures I took, Nico became the Sleeper - my delegated self, my loved friend, my indeterminate object of desire. 

First edition of 20 hand-bound copies.

Each book includes:

60 photographs on 100gsm coated paper 

156 printed pages over 56 spreads 

28 sheets with 22 gatefolds 

7 text passages

Longest spread measures 566mm

Book dimensions 148mm x 185mm.

With special thanks to Nico Gruzdev, Will Aldcroft, Jim Campbell, Lee Elkins and Ming Nguyen.