New Paltz Photoworks
New Paltz PhotoWorks — Featured Artist Spread, October 2026
LOST FRAMES was featured in a two-page spread in New Paltz PhotoWorks, highlighting an ongoing archival photography project that explores rediscovered images taken by American servicemen during the Vietnam War. The feature introduces the collection's focus on everyday life, forgotten moments, and the intersection of history, memory, and identity through the perspective of a second-generation Vietnamese American artist.
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BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
For Philippe Trinh, the photographs in LOST FRAMES carry a significance beyond their historical origins. As a second-generation Vietnamese American whose parents fled Vietnam during the war, his relationship with the country has largely been shaped by inherited memories and family stories. When his parents arrived in the United States, they brought no photographs of the lives they had left behind.
In many ways, LOST FRAMES brings together two parallel histories. One belongs to the American servicemen who photographed their experiences in Vietnam. The other belongs to Trinh's family, whose lives unfolded during those same years but left behind little visual record. Through images made by strangers, Trinh finds glimpses of a Vietnam that existed alongside his family's past.
This personal connection also informs how the photographs are arranged. Rather than following a chronological account of the war, the sequence moves through emotion and experience. Arrival gives way to routine, friendship and intimacy, then uncertainty and departure. Photographs made years apart are brought together through emotional rather than chronological connections.
At its heart lies a question of belonging. Like the American servicemen behind the camera, Trinh finds himself looking at Vietnam through the eyes of an outsider, though from a very different perspective. Vietnam is part of his identity, yet a country he has never fully known. In America, he carries a history rooted elsewhere. These lost frames offer more than glimpses of a distant past — they become a way of reconnecting with a history he inherited and finding a sense of belonging somewhere between two worlds.
A HISTORY IN FRAGMENTS
PHOTO ESSAY
LOST FRAMES is an archival documentary project built from rediscovered vernacular photographic negatives made during the Vietnam War. Through research, restoration and editing, the project examines everyday life beyond the familiar combat imagery of the war.
Conceived and curated by Philippe Trinh, LOST FRAMES is an ongoing photographic archive and exhibition offering a personal perspective on the conflict and the lives of those who experienced it. Through a carefully considered sequence of rediscovered photographs, the work reflects the passage of time, revealing a more intimate and human perspective of the Vietnam War.
Recovered from discarded negatives and separated from their original albums, many of these photographs survive without names, dates or complete histories. Once private and now seen publicly for the first time, they preserve fragments of everyday life — moments of travel, friendship, routine and quiet reflection. Through recovering, printing and sequencing them, Trinh explores how personal photographs take on new meaning within a public historical record.
Trinh envisions LOST FRAMES as a three-part exhibition exploring how the Vietnam War was reported, lived and remembered. The first presents a wall of LIFE magazine covers showing how the war was portrayed to Americans at home. The second features framed black-and-white photographs, scanned and printed by Trinh with technical guidance from CPW, revealing everyday life beyond combat. The final section connects the war's human consequences to Kingston through the story of Lynn Matteson, the younger brother of Kingston resident Don Matteson, who died at 19 from injuries sustained in Vietnam. Through family telegrams, postcards, personal letters and newspaper clippings, the exhibition reveals how one family's loss became part of a larger history.