Mary Inhea Kang didn’t pick up a camera until she was in college. Now, 10 years later, this Austin- and New York City-based photographer is focusing inward and learning how to take up space in her latest project, “In Praise of Friendship.”
Words by Rachel Priest | Photographs by Mary Inhea Kang
November 09, 2021
We’re less than 10 minutes into our conversation over Zoom, and I feel an instant connection — maybe even the beginnings of a friendship — to Mary Inhea Kang. We both share experiences as Asian American women in the media industry, but there’s nothing quite like knowing that someone else, even a complete stranger on the other side of a computer screen over 800 miles away, has experienced losing a parent. It’s a tricky sort of feeling, that cutting collision of empathy and grief, and it’s something you hope none of your friends have experienced.
For Mary, the sudden loss of her father, Sang Wuk Kang, is recent and fresh: in July 2020, during the height of the pandemic. For me, time has mostly dulled the once sharp pain of my own mom’s death eight years ago.
But it was the outpouring of support from her friends — from those who showed up to her father’s funeral, to others who delivered food to her family’s home — that inspired Mary to begin what she hopes will be a two-year-long project documenting friendship in all its forms.
“I think the reason why my family is OK is because of all those … beautiful friendships that … really made us feel whole,” Mary says.
Mary also wants to challenge the media’s laser focus on romantic relationships and expand it to include friendship in all its forms. The project, which she titled “In Praise of Friendship,” is just getting started. So far, she’s interviewed and photographed about 20 groups of friends, and counting.
There’s a certain beauty in the project. It isn’t just who she’s photographed — partners about to have their first baby, a trio of friends who met in college, a father and daughter, two neighbors, one of Mary’s friends — even though it’s a stunning display of diverse friendships. The real magic is in the how. With her Mamiya RZ67 and Canon 5D Mark III, she goes beyond the technical aspects of photography — aperture and shutter speed and ISO and focus — and gets to the heart. As Hannah Yoon, a Korean Canadian photographer based in Philadelphia, says, Mary cares.
“I also love her creativity and the space that she gives the people she photographs. ... I see so much confidence, I see a lot of tenderness, and very much paying attention to detail and to the person themselves.”
In this particular series of photographs, there’s a warm intimacy that draws you in, a feeling like you’re standing only a few feet away and witnessing their love in real time, in bright, vibrant color.
Bryan D (they/them): “Growing up in a very co-dependent culture where being together means everything, whether it is with family and friends, I kind of lost a sense of who I actually was. The first six months of the pandemic made me realize I had no sense of self, so there was and is immense inner work I am working through. Part of this work includes setting boundaries, for myself and for those I care deeply about. This time also revealed the importance of self-love and how neglecting this seeped into the crevices of my relationships. I am learning to lean more into genuine care and compassion. It all starts with me.”
Yahshel (she/her) & Mary M (she/her): “We are each other’s backbone. It’s chaotic and it’s complex, but we find solace in each other.”
Not only is friendship a common theme throughout her body of work, but also in the ways she has approached her career. Photography is a competitive field, especially if you want to make a living off it in the shrinking industry. After leaving Austin for New York City in 2017, Mary says genuine friendships helped her book gigs and become an established photographer.
“Every time I tried to be opportunistic and hustle, it never worked for me. It’s really cringy when I try that, and it just does not work for me,” Mary says, laughing. “Then I just kind of let go of that pressure and just kind of focused on making my works and bolstering genuine relations and friendships. I think that’s when work started coming naturally.”
And work did start coming. Mary has a growing list of corporate clients, bylines, and personal projects, made even more impressive by the fact that she didn’t even know how to use a camera until she started working for the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin. This year alone, she’s photographed for corporate clients like Apple and North Face Korea, as well as publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR. And, of course, she began “In Praise of Friendship.”
There’s also a deeper, cultural element to her project that shines through. And just like the project itself, it was born from acts of love and radical selflessness in times of hardship.
In May 2021, NPR reached out to Mary and 10 other photographers and asked them what it means to be Asian American during AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Heritage Month. While normally a time to celebrate the successes and contributions of the AAPI community, this year also brought increased awareness to the rising hate crimes against community members since the beginning of the pandemic, including the tragic deaths of six Asian women in the Atlanta spa shootings.
Mary, who immigrated to Austin from South Korea when she was 11, focused on the Korean concept of “jeong” as a form of resilience.
“In essence, jeong refers to the emotional and psychological bonds that join Koreans,” she wrote. “For Koreans, who’ve endured much political turmoil throughout the entire history of the nation, extending jeong to each other has been a necessary form of survival skill and self-preservation, and ultimately a revolutionary act of mutual aid and collective care.”
Because jeong can also fall under the umbrella of friendship, Mary says she wanted to continue exploring, beyond the NPR piece, how Korean Americans are practicing it in their lives.
T (she/her): “Jeong is as if another person foresees two steps ahead of the step you’re about to take and ensures that path is free of any obstacle that you might trip on. It’s a warm embrace, feeling safe and comfortable within collective care.”
Nam Ye (she/her) & Choon Ja (she/her)
Nam Ye: “To me, jeong is a reminder that people and nature are rooted in the same place. We have to nourish each other.”
Choon Ja: “I feel jeong when, as a neighbor, Nam Ye checks on me day and night on how I am doing. Her care and presence is jeong.”
So far, she’s talked to four people in her community about what it means to them, and the answers are just a glimpse into how vast the definition is: For neighbors Choon Ja and Nam Ye, it means checking up on one another. For single mother Kyung Ah, it means finally being able to extend it to herself as a form of self-compassion and care. For T, it means radical compassion embodied in small acts of care.
“Even if one may not have materialistic abundance, we can still have space for each other, share things with each other, look out for each other,” Mary says.
When I ask her how she expresses jeong, her face lights up. “Food is definitely my love language. With my friends, our conversations always revolve around food. I think that’s definitely one key form of jeong that we show to each other.”
She talks about the Korean stews she loves to make. One such dish, miyeokguk, is a popular seaweed stew that she learned to make from watching her mother. And, as is common, Mary has given it to her friends after they’ve given birth. There are also the hot pot parties that her friend and fellow photographer Mengwen Cao used to throw before the pandemic.
Mary says her father was very religious and had the first few words of Ephesians 4:2 — “Be completely humble and gentle” — hanging in the living room, entryway, and hallways of their Austin home. She laughs about it and tells me that the original copies, black text on A4 printer paper, are still taped on the walls and have become her dad’s “legacy” and a running joke in her family.
“I think I used to confuse that a lot with making myself small. But now I’m learning that that’s not what it means,” Mary says. “I’m learning [being humble] means living in my potential or attributing collaborative efforts that brought me to good things … but also at the same time, living in confidence. So I’m trying to let that sink in.”
She tells me it’s easy to feel small when you don’t have a strong sense of identity or belonging. In Austin, she says, her middle and high schools were mostly white, and while she was able to remain connected to her culture through her Korean church, she still felt like an outsider.
“But even there, there was a good division between first-generation Koreans and second-generation Koreans,” Mary says. “Second generations would make fun of me for not being Americanized enough, my accent — things like that.
“I also find myself minimizing myself a lot because I think I still struggle with the thought that I am American. I have citizenship, but why do I feel like I constantly need to minimize myself? And so that’s something I’m trying to consciously work on to, like, take up some space.”
Kyung Ah (she/her): “Frankly speaking, having lived in the States as a single mother and an immigrant woman of color over 20 years, I have found myself having forgotten what jeong is. I’ve only recently gotten to the point where I’m learning how to protect my energy and providing better care for myself. It is only recently that I’ve been able to extend jeong to myself — as a form of self-compassion. I am grateful for my daughter, Kaidon, whom I’m able to share jeong with.”
It’s a difficult task, though, especially when you’ve been conditioned since your childhood to be humble. Being quiet and small also fits nicely in the “model minority” myth perpetuated by both white America and the media, not to mention the ways in which women are often demonized for speaking up or demanding recognition.
So I ask Mary how she’s working to take up space in her relationships and in her work. Fighting for fair contracts — both as a younger photographer and as a woman of color — is just one way she’s working toward her goal to be humble, not hidden. She tells me about a time she worked on a project with a white male photographer of similar experience and later found out that he made twice as much as she did.
“I was maybe giving too much benefit of the doubt to people, and I, over time, learned that I have to practice boundaries in order for me to love myself in this industry.”
For Mary, taking up space also means learning about and standing in solidarity with other communities of color and celebrating those who have guided her in her professional journey, such as her mentor and former professor, the pioneering photographer Eli Reed. She also mentions her fellow executive board members at Authority Collective, a nonprofit she helped establish that supports and advocates for artists of color working in the film, photography, and virtual reality/augmented reality industries around the world.
Hannah is one of the founding members of Authority Collective and says she first met Mary when she was asked to recruit her to join the group. They immediately connected, not only by sharing the challenges they’ve faced as female, Korean photographers, but in their desire to change the industry for the better.
“Sometimes you can have a friend where you’re venting about something and it just keeps going into venting. With Mary, I always find that we end on like a very positive note. Not always like a solution, but we’re always just seeming hopeful,” Hannah says. “I really value my friendship with Mary. It goes beyond, you know, the work that we do in photography.”
I ask Mary if she’ll take portraits of herself and her friends to include in the series. At first she says no, but then she stops and thinks aloud: “Yeah, I wonder why I automatically thought I shouldn’t be in it ... like minimizing myself unconsciously. I guess it’s like a thing when I’m always told to be humble and told to not stand out.”
Since Mary’s latest project has allowed her to not just reflect on her own friendships but to get to hear the stories of others, I ask her what she thinks makes a friendship successful. She quickly lists things off the top of her head: growing, validating one another, and holding others accountable. Then, reflecting on the common themes that have emerged from “In Praise of Friendship,” she adds persistence, commitment, and consistency.
There are also friendships, she says, that stem from the “different joy [and] different pain different communities [experience] in the face of oppression.” These friendships, grounded in a shared, lived experience, have another layer of depth that breeds understanding and sparks that feeling of connection. In fact, this is the type of friendship that brought the members of Authority Collective together back in 2017.
“In general, a lot of us were feeling just frustrated with how we would be treated by editors, or even looked at by our peers, or the way people would talk to us. Oftentimes, you couldn’t really tell if it was like straight-up racism, or, you know, a lot of microaggressions,” Hannah says. “So I think we were feeling like there wasn’t much space for us.”
Friendship can also, and should, extend to oneself. The tensions and connections between individualism and collectivism are more visible in some of Mary’s other work, such as “Diasporic Communities,” a photo project about Nepali-speaking Bhutanese families in Austin, but it’s present in this friendship series, too.
The idea of exploring these themes comes from her own experiences as a South Korean immigrant trying to navigate America’s deeply ingrained culture of individualism. In Korea, she could go over to her friend’s house without knocking or go ask her next-door neighbor for salt and pepper if her mom ran out; in the United States, she says, her family has hardly ever known their neighbors. Yet Mary is conscious of the danger of going too far in either direction.
“Sometimes mob mentality can be dangerous, [and], yeah, extreme individualism, where we don’t help each other because we just have to mind our own business, is also dangerous,” Mary says. “So I just think that a healthy dose of each can be beautiful.”
Tiffany B (she/her/they/them), Spencer D (he/him/they/them), Aaron S (he/him).
Marleny (she/her) and Evelyn (she/her): “We are thriving in ways now we weren’t before, creating something new and building [a] safe space for the next generation. They say blood is thicker than water, but you know what’s thicker than blood? Mud. You cannot heal in the place that broke you. And my friends were the ones who picked me up. I am a stronger person now through that, and I am not going back to where you keep me mentally. Now I am a woman that has a village, I am not alone anymore.” — Marleny (she/her)
With “In Praise of Friendship,” Mary says that she tried to model this balance of individualism and collectivism by making sure each person pictured had a voice in the project, while still posing them with their friend.
Friendship is complicated, and it’s been even more so this past year and a half. Like millions in this country and around the world, I graduated from college in the uncertain spring of 2020 and soon found myself in a new house in a new city. Learning how to make new friends and sustain old friendships in a post-college environment was something that had been on my mind even before the pandemic. How was I supposed to find friends as loyal, as loving, as caring as those who had supported me after my mom’s death, or those who befriended the new girl from the Midwest in 11th grade, or those I bonded with while navigating college?
Each portrait included in “In Praise of Friendship” is striking, but it’s the words, and those of one person in particular, that seep into my soul and resonate. For it’s been friends, more often than family, who have helped me get through each new city, each new beginning, and each new season.
“They say blood is thicker than water, but you know what’s thicker than blood? Mud. You cannot heal in the place that broke you. And my friends were the ones who picked me up,” Marleny, photographed with her friend, Evelyn, said. “Now I am a woman that has a village, I am not alone anymore.”
And this rings true for me, too. Despite my fears and the challenges over the past year, I’ve been able to cultivate and grow my own village. As we near the end of our conversation, I thank Mary for her time.
“It just felt like talking to a friend,” she says.
“Jeong and the Language of Friendship” is available in Issue No. 2 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
Rachel Priest is the assistant editor at The Bitter Southerner. She grew up in Minnesota but moved to Georgia in high school, where she continued her education at the University of Georgia. She is passionate about amplifying adoptee and Asian voices, traveling, and a good cup of coffee.
Mary Inhea Kang is a South Korean American photographer based in Austin and New York City. She's driven by a desire to understand and document the identities we construct for ourselves and often she explores the tensions and limits between individualism and collectivism through her work. When approaching photos, she is inspired by her friend Shiyam Galyon’s quote, “I want to live in a world that feels moved by photos of non-white people at their best moments in life, rather than at their worst” while not ignoring the real issues that many marginalized communities face. Outside of work, she volunteers as a board member at Authority Collective.
Header image: Bryan D (they/them)
